Actually, if there were an infinite number of monkeys, great works would emerge rather quickly. Every such work would be written successfully, and within the shortest amount of time any monkey could take to write it. Not only that, but an infinite number of copies of the work would emerge at that very instant. Infinity is infinity -- a concept, not some very large number.
Isn't it obvious why the Virtual Boy didn't sell? Well, it's called the friggin Virtual Boy for starters. It sounds too much like a male RealDoll. Would you like a virtual boy to play with? Hmm? Oh, don't worry, it's not pedophilia if it's not a real boy, Mr. Jackson.
To tell you the truth, it looked like an awesome idea. I would probably have bought one if the name didn't immediately turn me off.
I seriously challenge ANYBODY, even those with true HI-FI equipment to tell me the difference between a CD and a good quality MP3Pro.
Easy. Try archiving old data cassette tapes, like those used with Commode Doors, Trash 80s, etc. This came up a while back on the ClassicCmp mailing list. The idea was to record the actual audio onto digital media that could then be played back into the computers' tape inputs. Sure, it may not be the most efficient way of getting data onto a machine, but classic computer enthusiasts often have rather unorthodox values:-). IIRC there was a general consensus (not scientific evidence) that using current lossy compression algorithms resulted in failure of the classic computer to recognize the audio as data.
allowing political speech is the means by which politicians keep us busy while they conduct business as usual.... In democracies, the people believe that they are free; in monarchies, they know better...
First of all, in a very direct sense, the monarch's subjects you describe only think they know better. I live in a US-style democracy (the US). If by some chance I find myself on national TV, I can say that the president should step down because his policies are destroying the country. I can say that and not fear for my life. In your monarchy, you'll wake up the next morning with your neck in a guillotine. That's freedom for you.
Now, undoubtedly, the freedom of speech does have a great pacifying effect as you suggest. Personally, I think this would make a nice trade-off, since I can think or say what I want and not have to worry about the aforementioned guillotine. However, it is completely unreasonable to believe that the pacification is sufficient to exclude the entire populace from generating political force. The first bit of evidence is this whole voting thing, where people get together and exert definite political force. And don't give me any crap about how bad the electoral college is; it only screws up when the vote is very, very, very close, and it's only used in one election out of a shitload of others. The second point is that yeah, the politicians can do some shitty stuff behind closed doors, but if they get too far out of line, their asses are grass. Cases in point: Trent Lott, Ollie North, the Watergate people, Joseph McCarthy. Hrm, the freedom of the press figures in a lot of that, too. Put that in your queen and smoke it.
What about the peace protests?
I agree to a point. I doubt that many political protests have much direct force. Political protests do have indirect force, though. If it's a big enough issue, it plants thoughts in people's heads, whether the heads belong to regular people or politicians. Those thoughts get involved in other political activities, and that's where the effect. It's trickle-down, sure, but it's not zero. Ok, now for the other end: Non-political protests can work and do so very directly. Ever heard of a strike? When the employees don't work, business gets a shaft up the cornhole. It then becomes very economically feasible to negotiate directly with the protestors. Bam! Dez you direct effect. And if you know much about US history, you'll know that strikes now are much more effective and much less dangerous than they were, say, 100 years ago.
And how does a monarchy fit into the freedom to protest? Think May 30th Incident, in China, in the early 20th century, when things were going crazy over in that quadrant. No, not the May 4th movement, that's a whole 'nother deal. the May 30th incident was a bunch o' Chinese sweatshop workers wanting a better deal, and they went on strike a couple of times. And who was it that started firing upon them with guns? Oh yeah, it was the British! Dez yo monarchy for ya. Put that in your queen and smoke it.
Umm... Wouldn't the profile of a flying saucer, viewed from a satellite be, um, circular?
No. For that to always be true, it would have to be a flying sphere. If it's just a saucer, you might be looking at its front instead of its top and see something else, definitely not a circle.
I have read a little bit...
on
Effective Java
·
· Score: 5, Informative
...of this book, and I will most definitely finish it when I have the time. Unless you are a balls-to-the-wall guru already (99.999% chance you aren't), you will become a better Java developer by reading this book. It pays to read even some of the simpler and more obvious tips, as your viewpoint on those issues might not be as omniscient as you think.
Best of all, it's not 3 feet think like Effective Java Unleashed or The Effective Java Bible would be. You get lots of info with minimal fluff.
I can't believe the would cover Perl, tcl, etc, and leave out the Windows Batch file scripting language! This is dispicable! It's so powerful, no wonder it's #1.
DOS scripting is no longer Microsoft's preferred scripting feature.
Windows batch files are a holdover from DOS. DOS as we know it originally ran on IBM PCs and early descendants, which were cheap, slow, 16-bit, underfeatured toy computers. At that same time, Unix was running on expensive, fast, 32-bit, featurful computers. Before that, Unix did run on 16-bit computers (various submodels of PDP-11), but PDP-11s were certainly more expensive and more featureful than 8086- and 80286-based PCs, and PDPs were most definitely not toys.
The point? Unix scripting was better than DOS scripting. Windows evolved from DOS, and as a result it got DOS's scripting capabilities. That evolution is only now reaching the stage where it can be said with any regularity that Windows is evolving from itself rather than from DOS. Win2K and (maybe) WinNT4 were the first incarnations of Windows with this property. It is a very slow process.
What we see now is Windows evolving its own scripting engines. I'm not savvy about some of these things, but I do know that there are VBScript or Windows Scripting Host for automating things in the OS, and VBA for scripting inside individual apps like Excel or Access. Granted, these are all based on VB, which is lacking when compared to Java or C++, but these are quite well-suited for scripting in a Windows environment.
Just yesterday, for example, I wrote a simple Windows script that renames files in a directory tree by doing regular expression search and replace. This clearly represents an improvement over the legacy DOS scripting capabilities.
I mean, it's so useless that people are making millions of dollars a year with software written in C++.
That's a logical fallacy. Just because C++ is commonly used successfully doesn't mean a certain part of C++ is commonly used successfully. Nor does it tell whether the success is due to the language's design or to the ingenuity of the programmers using the language. It's a very common thing for the cout identifier to be the only part of the standard library used by a C++ programmer. Other libraries provide similar functionality. So you can't assume that STL, for instance, is in use in each and every C++ product out there.
really need to invent a different language.
The D site provides a very good justification of the language's invention.
I like the idea in C and C++ where the base laguage is simple (especially C)
While I won't dare disagree with you on C, C++ is not simple! Perhaps you should read a little more about it to understand. Things I personally object to in C++ are:
The multiple casting notations: (type), foo_case<type>
Excessively arcane template system
Every design-of-syntax error listed in the D site's overview
Retarded naming scheme, small size, and wierd design of standard library. The damn thing's almost useless.
So basically, C++ is anything but simple. It's a big, bloated monster and is loaded with nasty cruft.
One final bitch: I want the person pulled into the street and shot who was responsible for the font used in the Stroustrup C++ book's code examples. Who the hell writes code in an italic, proportional, serif font?! The only thing more painful than programming in C++ is reading about programming in C++.
Not everyone did, at least at first. I was like 13 or 14 when the AOL 1.0 disk (a floppy) came to me out of the blue. I knew about the Internet, and I had even experienced it through a BBS-email gateway (FTP over email was... interesting). The problem I was experiencing was this: while I could find magazines and books and other materials that taught me about the Internet, an actual dialup connection (we're talking pre-WWW here) was horrendously expensive where I lived in Oklahoma. IIRC, the materials that came with the AOL disk advertised some really good rates compared with the other local rates. Of course, they had neglected to install an access number in my LATA, so I never gave them any business. But I didn't begin to associate AOL with newbies for quite some time.
I am Jeffrey Sharp, the (new) webmaster of the ClassicCmp site. I'd like to apologize for and explain the current state of the web site.
ClassicCmp was a mailing list first, and I guess that's about what it is today, but much more is planned. I really mean that! CC was started in 1997 by people other than me. There was a very simple web site up for a while, but the guy in charge of it never updated it, and nobody else cared to do it. It stagnated. I joined the list about two years ago, and I became the list administrator just a few months ago when Jay West decided to take a break. I would have liked to start working on a new, improved CC site right then, but I was also working very hard to finish college. When you factor out the time I spend (usually) every day moderating posts for the cctech list (OT posts are filtered there), I had zero time for any other CC-related work. I needed to get something up there quick to fix the very incorrect 1997 pages, so what you see there now is my 3AM coffee-induced hack.
Some really nice things are planned for classiccmp.org:
Better post archiving with spamproofing. My spamproofing method is somewhat unique.
An archive of data files (software, docs, images, etc.).
A link farm, which we hope will become a start-here-first resource for vintage-computing-related surfing.
A FAQ. There is an old FAQ which you can probably still find with Google somewhere out there, but it has some very incorrect things in it. I'm working on a new FAQ.
More moderators for cctech. Right now it's just me, so there is a serious lag time for cctech subscribers. We just implemented the second, moderated list a few months ago, and it seems to be working fine. It just needs more moderators.
I graduated from college a week or two ago and have settled into a new job. I now have ample time to spend making something nice for ClassicCmp. You can expect to see something actually worthwile there in the next few days.
If you even the slightest bit interested in classic computers, please goto the list information page and subscribe to the list. At last count (a few days ago), we had 720 members. Average load is 50-100 messages per day. We'd love to add more people to the discussion.
Well, my 15-second perusal of their site has thoroughly convinced me to steer clear of their project. I can figure out the "BSD" part of the name, but what does "micro" mean? Is it for embedded machines? Is it a floppy distro? Is it just a small distro? Maybe it is BSD for microcomputers, and they don't know about Free/Net/OpenBSD.
The first thing I see when I go to the FreeBSD website is this:
FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible, DEC Alpha, and PC-98 architectures. It is derived from BSD UNIX, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development.
In my 15-second perusal of the FreeBSD site, I get a good idea of what FreeBSD is. The only impression I get from the MicroBSD site is that they care more about blogwhoring than about writing any real software.
Frankly, branching a new distro for some petty reason (I'm going to assume that's what it is since it is so damn hard to find out) instead of contributing tools and patches to an existing BSD seems just a tad too reminiscent of that other large free OS community.
I was born in 1979, but my earliest memory is from 1970. My PDP-11/20 (similar to this one) has two core memories that combine for a whopping 16KB of memory! If you think that's cool, well, I can actually modify my memories with a Teletype! Indeed, "ttys" have quite a large effect upon me.
The Sony SDM-X82 (18.1") is standard issue at my new workplace. It switches via a front panel button between two input channels. One channel has both HD15 and DVI connectors, and the other channel has only a HD15 connector. I haven't used it with a DVI video card, but it looks great when driven by an analog signal. Color is good, and if it isn't, there's a lot of adjustability. My color vision is screwed up because of childhood medical problems, but my SDM-X82's OSD lets me jack up the contrast et al so that I see what others see at more normal settings. Response time is average, which might be good enough for gaming, but I wouldn't know because I don't game at work. The unit's aesthetics are excellent.
If winning means producing a better product, and that is what I'm arguing, then you'll want to use their product and not any other. If they win (over Linux), that means they made something better than Linux.
They'll go right back to the same crappy service and products... when Linux goes away
Oh, I doubt it. If they did, someone would just go revive Linux or build another free OS with which to whip their collective ass. The great thing about Linux is that it can never really be squashed; there will always be people who want to write quality free software in online communities. Microsoft can't make them go away. Microsoft's only recourse is to keep elevating the quality of their product to compete.
since when has Microsoft ever played a seriously fair game of ball?
I didn't say they had a history of it. We're all wonderfully aware of their past transgressions. But it looks as if this could possibly be a move in the right direction as far as business practices go. If we don't give them the chance to shape up, we're all hypocrites. It's not right to complain so loudly about how bad this or that is and then refuse them any chance to solve the problems. Or are we all really just in love with the fight itself?
Their type of competition is anti-competitive
I'd call that a contradiction...
How much better would our technology be if corps like BeOS would have been allowed to compete
You mean Be, don't you? Be was allowed to compete, just like Linux was/is. Be failed. They had some great stuff, but it had drawbacks -- major ones. It was too Mac-oriented for a long time. Macs have only a small fraction of the personal computer market share, and with Apple's jealousy, Be could only have a small fraction of that fraction. Then there was the horrible hardware support. A couple of years ago, I was pumped to try BeOS, but my x86 PC just wasn't supported well enough. And the biggest problem? We've heard it before. Software, software, software. Where was it? Be just didn't have what it takes.
the usual ignorance on the consumer's part
A very important note: if you're trying to get people to use your product, calling them stupid isn't a great way to start. How well would the following ad go over in PC Magazine? "Use Linux, because you're a fucking moron!" Not the best way to start a relationship...
But at least in all honesty on a long enough time line there is no way any single corporation can compete with GNU/Linux
Then what's the worry? As long as there's a community around like the Linux community, there will always be a good OS for your box -- no matter who makes it. Competition, man.
For years now MSFT has said that their platform is more user friendly by providing nice GUIs...
It is important to note that they aren't dumping GUI-based administration. They're keeping it and providing hooks into it from a CLI. So it's not so much an admission that CLIs are better at everything; it's an admission that CLIs are better at some things, if implemented in a certain way.
this validates the UNIX way of doing things and should make it easier to argue this point when competing for (a) large (number of) server installs/farms
Depending on how well this is all integrated, Microsoft may make this argument a tough sell yet. They could point to the non-OO, non-XML, non-other-buzzword nature of the UNIX way, and they may also point out deficiencies of UNIX graphical administration utilities.
This is the moment of truth for all you people out there who have made arguments like the following:
Having both Gnome and KDE is good because the competition will cause both to get better
Having a Linux/UNIX desktop environment is good because the competition (with Windows) will cause both to get better
I've seen these kinds of arguments spouted repeatedly by purveyors of the Slashdot party line, and I've even made a few myself. What we have here is a confirmation of the underlying idea: that competition improves products.
Plan and simple, Microsoft is competing. They've acknowledged a strength in a competitor's product and are (finally) going to tackle it head-on instead of with shady business, cash, and lawyers. They're going to try to build a better product. This is what we've wanted all along, isn't it?
I wish Microsoft's programmers the best of luck in creating these new features. They will most likely be a great improvement to the Windows platform. Likewise, I wish the Linux/UNIX communities the best of luck in creating new features to greatly improve Linux/UNIX. I believe that competition between the two groups will significantly advance the start of the art in software. Microsoft is ready to play serious but fair ball, and it's up to the rest of us to build a winning team and play the game. Humanity stands only to gain.
That's exactly right. Even when you reach the highest level, there are still many other ways and inticements to continue the model of incremental advancements ad infinitum. There are trade skills, items to acquire, or quests to complete. And since this wasn't enough to pacify the upper-level players' need for repetitive play, Verant introduced "alternative advancement experience points", whereby certain character abilities may be further increased even after reaching the level cap. Basically, there's no reasonably attainable ultimate form of any class/race combination, and so the cycle of incremental advancements never ends.
It's just not that easy. Once you're a little bit into the game, you get into the endless cycle of "just one more level and I'll...". So there's always some sort of enticement for you to spend time with the game and get some sort of incremental advancement. Once you have it, two things usually occur:
The advancement has little or no noticeable effect
You become enticed by the next incremental advancement, which you think *will* make a difference
Next, you'll probably join a guild. In my EQ playing experience, I was a member of four or five different ones, a founding member of one (present at the GM head-count), and the webmaster of another. The amount of inter- and intra-guild bickering and political masturbatory flagellation was easily several orders of magnitude beyond even the most caustic Fox News Channel broadcast. This was true for each and every guild I was in. No guild was interested in helping each other out, and no guild members posessed the least care for the welfare of the guild as a whole. Comments from others confirm my suspicions that my experiences were typical, that guild membership tends to make the game even less fun. That said, peer pressure in the game makes a player *want* to be the member of a guild.
The two years of my EverQuest addiction, 2000 and 2001, were easily the worst two years of my life. I got my worst grades in college, a national merit scholar now with several Ws, an I, and a couple of Fs. My GPA was lowered by 0.4, forever preventing me from having any summa with my cum laude. I couldn't perform at work and ended up quitting my job to preserve what little chance I had of being rehired (which later turned out to be zero). I went from embedded software engineering to working at a call center for $9.25/hour. My wife and I got a divorce. I don't know how much of this to blame on EverQuest, but it *was* a factor. The last argument I had with my ex-wife, for instance, involved the rightful ownership of a set of shadow knight armor. Fun.
EverQuest is an evil force. Go ahead, plug in and ruin your life, too.
Fast foward to 2003, and a lot of online games are nothing BUT role playing
I gotta dissent on this; having played EQ and having successfully quit (after relapsing twice), there is actually very little real role playing happening in the game. For most people, when you play EQ, you aren't a necromancer or a paladin or whatever, you are a geek sitting behind a computer with an avatar in a fancy MUD. There are servers, clients, protocols, zone boundaries, arbitrary limitations, etc that prevent you from really imagining you are in a fantasy world. Players talk to each other like they are on IRC. Hardly anybody goes around actually playing the part of their character. If someone went round saying "I am Blarzabad the Necromancer. Thou shalt flee or face thy doom!", they would most certainly recieve laughter.
It's not role playing. It's just repetitive mindless number-incrementing.
Wage-Monkey is an interesting term to be throwing around when you've just finished telling us that the tech was there because you "got unemployed"
It's not all that interesting. He was a wage monkey, and I was unemployed. Hey, I didn't say which was better!:-)
The "wage-monkey" has every right to disconnect additional outlets that you aren't paying for.
Maybe, maybe not. It doesn't matter because I did pay to have those additional outlets installed, and this cable co doesn't charge anything per month for extra outlets. So I did pay for those outlets, which removes the monkey's right to disco them. If he did disco them and, and then later someone reconned them, they'd probably charge me the install fee again. Bastards.
One interesting solution, and I've heard this before somewhere: I previously had 'digital' cable (which isn't all digital, but that's another story), cable modem service, and even 'digital' phone service (didn't notice any difference, but it was cheaper than [company2]) through [company]. Then I got unemployed for a while, and those things became tough to afford. The first thing to go was the phone service. I have a cell phone and use it almost exclusively, and my cell service is a good plan with free nights and weekends. Cable TV service was tougher to let go of, but I eventually realized that all I ever watched was the History Channel. Most of the shows there are okay but IMHO aren't nearly as enjoyable as an honest-to-[deity] academic text. So I got rid of the cable TV service. I still had cable modem service; its priority was somewhere around the food-and-water level.
A few days ago a wage-monkey came out to uninstall my telephone interface. After he let himself into my backyard, I politely went out and asked him what the hell he was doing. He explained and then asked me which of the three cable jacks in the house my modem was plugged into. My first reaction was that I didn't have time to trace which line terminated at the appropriate wall jack. Then I realized that he aimed to disconnect two of my three jacks, since I 'obviously' didn't need them. I regarded this idea with disdain, since I wanted the freedom to move my cable modem to a different jack if I were to rearrange my house (and such an activity *is* planned). I told the monkey as much, and he finished his work without disconnecting any jacks.
A few days after that, I accidentally turned on a TV that was still connected to a cable outlet. I saw a picture! I scanned through the channels, and behold, I now had more active channels than I did with the 'digital' service. I wasn't looking to break the law; I simply stepped on the damn remote control.
My suggestion: lose the cable service, keep the cable modem service. Watch TV. Oh, and one more phrase: at your own risk.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if there were an infinite number of monkeys, great works would emerge rather quickly. Every such work would be written successfully, and within the shortest amount of time any monkey could take to write it. Not only that, but an infinite number of copies of the work would emerge at that very instant. Infinity is infinity -- a concept, not some very large number.
To tell you the truth, it looked like an awesome idea. I would probably have bought one if the name didn't immediately turn me off.
Easy. Try archiving old data cassette tapes, like those used with Commode Doors, Trash 80s, etc. This came up a while back on the ClassicCmp mailing list. The idea was to record the actual audio onto digital media that could then be played back into the computers' tape inputs. Sure, it may not be the most efficient way of getting data onto a machine, but classic computer enthusiasts often have rather unorthodox values :-). IIRC there was a general consensus (not scientific evidence) that using current lossy compression algorithms resulted in failure of the classic computer to recognize the audio as data.
I guess that's why the vacuum tubes are so popular, right?
The what? (you insensitive clod)
First of all, in a very direct sense, the monarch's subjects you describe only think they know better. I live in a US-style democracy (the US). If by some chance I find myself on national TV, I can say that the president should step down because his policies are destroying the country. I can say that and not fear for my life. In your monarchy, you'll wake up the next morning with your neck in a guillotine. That's freedom for you.
Now, undoubtedly, the freedom of speech does have a great pacifying effect as you suggest. Personally, I think this would make a nice trade-off, since I can think or say what I want and not have to worry about the aforementioned guillotine. However, it is completely unreasonable to believe that the pacification is sufficient to exclude the entire populace from generating political force. The first bit of evidence is this whole voting thing, where people get together and exert definite political force. And don't give me any crap about how bad the electoral college is; it only screws up when the vote is very, very, very close, and it's only used in one election out of a shitload of others. The second point is that yeah, the politicians can do some shitty stuff behind closed doors, but if they get too far out of line, their asses are grass. Cases in point: Trent Lott, Ollie North, the Watergate people, Joseph McCarthy. Hrm, the freedom of the press figures in a lot of that, too. Put that in your queen and smoke it.
What about the peace protests?
I agree to a point. I doubt that many political protests have much direct force. Political protests do have indirect force, though. If it's a big enough issue, it plants thoughts in people's heads, whether the heads belong to regular people or politicians. Those thoughts get involved in other political activities, and that's where the effect. It's trickle-down, sure, but it's not zero. Ok, now for the other end: Non-political protests can work and do so very directly. Ever heard of a strike? When the employees don't work, business gets a shaft up the cornhole. It then becomes very economically feasible to negotiate directly with the protestors. Bam! Dez you direct effect. And if you know much about US history, you'll know that strikes now are much more effective and much less dangerous than they were, say, 100 years ago.
And how does a monarchy fit into the freedom to protest? Think May 30th Incident, in China, in the early 20th century, when things were going crazy over in that quadrant. No, not the May 4th movement, that's a whole 'nother deal. the May 30th incident was a bunch o' Chinese sweatshop workers wanting a better deal, and they went on strike a couple of times. And who was it that started firing upon them with guns? Oh yeah, it was the British! Dez yo monarchy for ya. Put that in your queen and smoke it.
No. For that to always be true, it would have to be a flying sphere. If it's just a saucer, you might be looking at its front instead of its top and see something else, definitely not a circle.
Best of all, it's not 3 feet think like Effective Java Unleashed or The Effective Java Bible would be. You get lots of info with minimal fluff.
DOS scripting is no longer Microsoft's preferred scripting feature.
Windows batch files are a holdover from DOS. DOS as we know it originally ran on IBM PCs and early descendants, which were cheap, slow, 16-bit, underfeatured toy computers. At that same time, Unix was running on expensive, fast, 32-bit, featurful computers. Before that, Unix did run on 16-bit computers (various submodels of PDP-11), but PDP-11s were certainly more expensive and more featureful than 8086- and 80286-based PCs, and PDPs were most definitely not toys.
The point? Unix scripting was better than DOS scripting. Windows evolved from DOS, and as a result it got DOS's scripting capabilities. That evolution is only now reaching the stage where it can be said with any regularity that Windows is evolving from itself rather than from DOS. Win2K and (maybe) WinNT4 were the first incarnations of Windows with this property. It is a very slow process.
What we see now is Windows evolving its own scripting engines. I'm not savvy about some of these things, but I do know that there are VBScript or Windows Scripting Host for automating things in the OS, and VBA for scripting inside individual apps like Excel or Access. Granted, these are all based on VB, which is lacking when compared to Java or C++, but these are quite well-suited for scripting in a Windows environment.
Just yesterday, for example, I wrote a simple Windows script that renames files in a directory tree by doing regular expression search and replace. This clearly represents an improvement over the legacy DOS scripting capabilities.
That's a logical fallacy. Just because C++ is commonly used successfully doesn't mean a certain part of C++ is commonly used successfully. Nor does it tell whether the success is due to the language's design or to the ingenuity of the programmers using the language. It's a very common thing for the cout identifier to be the only part of the standard library used by a C++ programmer. Other libraries provide similar functionality. So you can't assume that STL, for instance, is in use in each and every C++ product out there.
really need to invent a different language.
The D site provides a very good justification of the language's invention.
While I won't dare disagree with you on C, C++ is not simple! Perhaps you should read a little more about it to understand. Things I personally object to in C++ are:
- The multiple casting notations: ( type ), foo _case< type >
- Excessively arcane template system
- Every design-of-syntax error listed in the D site's overview
- Retarded naming scheme, small size, and wierd design of standard library. The damn thing's almost useless.
So basically, C++ is anything but simple. It's a big, bloated monster and is loaded with nasty cruft.One final bitch: I want the person pulled into the street and shot who was responsible for the font used in the Stroustrup C++ book's code examples. Who the hell writes code in an italic, proportional, serif font?! The only thing more painful than programming in C++ is reading about programming in C++.
Not everyone did, at least at first. I was like 13 or 14 when the AOL 1.0 disk (a floppy) came to me out of the blue. I knew about the Internet, and I had even experienced it through a BBS-email gateway (FTP over email was ... interesting). The problem I was experiencing was this: while I could find magazines and books and other materials that taught me about the Internet, an actual dialup connection (we're talking pre-WWW here) was horrendously expensive where I lived in Oklahoma. IIRC, the materials that came with the AOL disk advertised some really good rates compared with the other local rates. Of course, they had neglected to install an access number in my LATA, so I never gave them any business. But I didn't begin to associate AOL with newbies for quite some time.
ClassicCmp was a mailing list first, and I guess that's about what it is today, but much more is planned. I really mean that! CC was started in 1997 by people other than me. There was a very simple web site up for a while, but the guy in charge of it never updated it, and nobody else cared to do it. It stagnated. I joined the list about two years ago, and I became the list administrator just a few months ago when Jay West decided to take a break. I would have liked to start working on a new, improved CC site right then, but I was also working very hard to finish college. When you factor out the time I spend (usually) every day moderating posts for the cctech list (OT posts are filtered there), I had zero time for any other CC-related work. I needed to get something up there quick to fix the very incorrect 1997 pages, so what you see there now is my 3AM coffee-induced hack.
Some really nice things are planned for classiccmp.org:
- Better post archiving with spamproofing. My spamproofing method is somewhat unique.
- An archive of data files (software, docs, images, etc.).
- A link farm, which we hope will become a start-here-first resource for vintage-computing-related surfing.
- A FAQ. There is an old FAQ which you can probably still find with Google somewhere out there, but it has some very incorrect things in it. I'm working on a new FAQ.
- More moderators for cctech. Right now it's just me, so there is a serious lag time for cctech subscribers. We just implemented the second, moderated list a few months ago, and it seems to be working fine. It just needs more moderators.
I graduated from college a week or two ago and have settled into a new job. I now have ample time to spend making something nice for ClassicCmp. You can expect to see something actually worthwile there in the next few days.If you even the slightest bit interested in classic computers, please goto the list information page and subscribe to the list. At last count (a few days ago), we had 720 members. Average load is 50-100 messages per day. We'd love to add more people to the discussion.
The first thing I see when I go to the FreeBSD website is this:
In my 15-second perusal of the FreeBSD site, I get a good idea of what FreeBSD is. The only impression I get from the MicroBSD site is that they care more about blogwhoring than about writing any real software.Frankly, branching a new distro for some petty reason (I'm going to assume that's what it is since it is so damn hard to find out) instead of contributing tools and patches to an existing BSD seems just a tad too reminiscent of that other large free OS community.
I was born in 1979, but my earliest memory is from 1970. My PDP-11/20 (similar to this one) has two core memories that combine for a whopping 16KB of memory! If you think that's cool, well, I can actually modify my memories with a Teletype! Indeed, "ttys" have quite a large effect upon me.
The Sony SDM-X82 (18.1") is standard issue at my new workplace. It switches via a front panel button between two input channels. One channel has both HD15 and DVI connectors, and the other channel has only a HD15 connector. I haven't used it with a DVI video card, but it looks great when driven by an analog signal. Color is good, and if it isn't, there's a lot of adjustability. My color vision is screwed up because of childhood medical problems, but my SDM-X82's OSD lets me jack up the contrast et al so that I see what others see at more normal settings. Response time is average, which might be good enough for gaming, but I wouldn't know because I don't game at work. The unit's aesthetics are excellent.
If winning means producing a better product, and that is what I'm arguing, then you'll want to use their product and not any other. If they win (over Linux), that means they made something better than Linux.
They'll go right back to the same crappy service and products ... when Linux goes away
Oh, I doubt it. If they did, someone would just go revive Linux or build another free OS with which to whip their collective ass. The great thing about Linux is that it can never really be squashed; there will always be people who want to write quality free software in online communities. Microsoft can't make them go away. Microsoft's only recourse is to keep elevating the quality of their product to compete.
since when has Microsoft ever played a seriously fair game of ball?
I didn't say they had a history of it. We're all wonderfully aware of their past transgressions. But it looks as if this could possibly be a move in the right direction as far as business practices go. If we don't give them the chance to shape up, we're all hypocrites. It's not right to complain so loudly about how bad this or that is and then refuse them any chance to solve the problems. Or are we all really just in love with the fight itself?
Their type of competition is anti-competitive
I'd call that a contradiction...
How much better would our technology be if corps like BeOS would have been allowed to compete
You mean Be, don't you? Be was allowed to compete, just like Linux was/is. Be failed. They had some great stuff, but it had drawbacks -- major ones. It was too Mac-oriented for a long time. Macs have only a small fraction of the personal computer market share, and with Apple's jealousy, Be could only have a small fraction of that fraction. Then there was the horrible hardware support. A couple of years ago, I was pumped to try BeOS, but my x86 PC just wasn't supported well enough. And the biggest problem? We've heard it before. Software, software, software. Where was it? Be just didn't have what it takes.
the usual ignorance on the consumer's part
A very important note: if you're trying to get people to use your product, calling them stupid isn't a great way to start. How well would the following ad go over in PC Magazine? "Use Linux, because you're a fucking moron!" Not the best way to start a relationship...
But at least in all honesty on a long enough time line there is no way any single corporation can compete with GNU/Linux
Then what's the worry? As long as there's a community around like the Linux community, there will always be a good OS for your box -- no matter who makes it. Competition, man.
It is important to note that they aren't dumping GUI-based administration. They're keeping it and providing hooks into it from a CLI. So it's not so much an admission that CLIs are better at everything; it's an admission that CLIs are better at some things, if implemented in a certain way.
this validates the UNIX way of doing things and should make it easier to argue this point when competing for (a) large (number of) server installs/farms
Depending on how well this is all integrated, Microsoft may make this argument a tough sell yet. They could point to the non-OO, non-XML, non-other-buzzword nature of the UNIX way, and they may also point out deficiencies of UNIX graphical administration utilities.
They already did. Ever heard of XENIX?
- Having both Gnome and KDE is good because the competition will cause both to get better
- Having a Linux/UNIX desktop environment is good because the competition (with Windows) will cause both to get better
I've seen these kinds of arguments spouted repeatedly by purveyors of the Slashdot party line, and I've even made a few myself. What we have here is a confirmation of the underlying idea: that competition improves products.Plan and simple, Microsoft is competing. They've acknowledged a strength in a competitor's product and are (finally) going to tackle it head-on instead of with shady business, cash, and lawyers. They're going to try to build a better product. This is what we've wanted all along, isn't it?
I wish Microsoft's programmers the best of luck in creating these new features. They will most likely be a great improvement to the Windows platform. Likewise, I wish the Linux/UNIX communities the best of luck in creating new features to greatly improve Linux/UNIX. I believe that competition between the two groups will significantly advance the start of the art in software. Microsoft is ready to play serious but fair ball, and it's up to the rest of us to build a winning team and play the game. Humanity stands only to gain.
That's exactly right. Even when you reach the highest level, there are still many other ways and inticements to continue the model of incremental advancements ad infinitum. There are trade skills, items to acquire, or quests to complete. And since this wasn't enough to pacify the upper-level players' need for repetitive play, Verant introduced "alternative advancement experience points", whereby certain character abilities may be further increased even after reaching the level cap. Basically, there's no reasonably attainable ultimate form of any class/race combination, and so the cycle of incremental advancements never ends.
It's just not that easy. Once you're a little bit into the game, you get into the endless cycle of "just one more level and I'll...". So there's always some sort of enticement for you to spend time with the game and get some sort of incremental advancement. Once you have it, two things usually occur:
- The advancement has little or no noticeable effect
- You become enticed by the next incremental advancement, which you think *will* make a difference
Next, you'll probably join a guild. In my EQ playing experience, I was a member of four or five different ones, a founding member of one (present at the GM head-count), and the webmaster of another. The amount of inter- and intra-guild bickering and political masturbatory flagellation was easily several orders of magnitude beyond even the most caustic Fox News Channel broadcast. This was true for each and every guild I was in. No guild was interested in helping each other out, and no guild members posessed the least care for the welfare of the guild as a whole. Comments from others confirm my suspicions that my experiences were typical, that guild membership tends to make the game even less fun. That said, peer pressure in the game makes a player *want* to be the member of a guild.The two years of my EverQuest addiction, 2000 and 2001, were easily the worst two years of my life. I got my worst grades in college, a national merit scholar now with several Ws, an I, and a couple of Fs. My GPA was lowered by 0.4, forever preventing me from having any summa with my cum laude. I couldn't perform at work and ended up quitting my job to preserve what little chance I had of being rehired (which later turned out to be zero). I went from embedded software engineering to working at a call center for $9.25/hour. My wife and I got a divorce. I don't know how much of this to blame on EverQuest, but it *was* a factor. The last argument I had with my ex-wife, for instance, involved the rightful ownership of a set of shadow knight armor. Fun.
EverQuest is an evil force. Go ahead, plug in and ruin your life, too.
I gotta dissent on this; having played EQ and having successfully quit (after relapsing twice), there is actually very little real role playing happening in the game. For most people, when you play EQ, you aren't a necromancer or a paladin or whatever, you are a geek sitting behind a computer with an avatar in a fancy MUD. There are servers, clients, protocols, zone boundaries, arbitrary limitations, etc that prevent you from really imagining you are in a fantasy world. Players talk to each other like they are on IRC. Hardly anybody goes around actually playing the part of their character. If someone went round saying "I am Blarzabad the Necromancer. Thou shalt flee or face thy doom!", they would most certainly recieve laughter.
It's not role playing. It's just repetitive mindless number-incrementing.
It's not all that interesting. He was a wage monkey, and I was unemployed. Hey, I didn't say which was better! :-)
The "wage-monkey" has every right to disconnect additional outlets that you aren't paying for.
Maybe, maybe not. It doesn't matter because I did pay to have those additional outlets installed, and this cable co doesn't charge anything per month for extra outlets. So I did pay for those outlets, which removes the monkey's right to disco them. If he did disco them and, and then later someone reconned them, they'd probably charge me the install fee again. Bastards.
A few days ago a wage-monkey came out to uninstall my telephone interface. After he let himself into my backyard, I politely went out and asked him what the hell he was doing. He explained and then asked me which of the three cable jacks in the house my modem was plugged into. My first reaction was that I didn't have time to trace which line terminated at the appropriate wall jack. Then I realized that he aimed to disconnect two of my three jacks, since I 'obviously' didn't need them. I regarded this idea with disdain, since I wanted the freedom to move my cable modem to a different jack if I were to rearrange my house (and such an activity *is* planned). I told the monkey as much, and he finished his work without disconnecting any jacks.
A few days after that, I accidentally turned on a TV that was still connected to a cable outlet. I saw a picture! I scanned through the channels, and behold, I now had more active channels than I did with the 'digital' service. I wasn't looking to break the law; I simply stepped on the damn remote control.
My suggestion: lose the cable service, keep the cable modem service. Watch TV. Oh, and one more phrase: at your own risk.