We're facing this at my company too. We're just about to upgrade from SVN 1.4 to 1.5 (far better branching and merging), but it's still painfully slow, which means developers are less likely to do one-off branches to try some experimental feature. Instead, they make the change to trunk, which can make back-tracking out harder. Git is lightning quick for this kind of thing, and allows them to work off-line and sync up later.
The problem with Git is the utter lack of visualization, plugins, and integration with other tools.
For example, we use Fisheye as a web-interface to our SVN repository - it's a great way to watch the codebase, or query it to drill down to see specific changes. There's an svn-git gateway tool, but it's rather rudamentary.
If there was a similar tool, plus a proper Eclipse plugin, I think we'd make the switch. Git's speed is just unbelievably fast.
bash has been default since at least Tiger, and I believe Jaguar as well, not that it matters. Choice of a default shell is hardly an advantage, just a difference. I happily used tcsh as my default (interactive) shell for many years, on SunOS and Solaris.
Standard directory names like/home and such.
OS X has standard directories too, just longer ones for their own (and it still has/bin/etc for unix-only apps). Again, not an advantage, just a difference.
Standard text-based package managers like apt-get. My mac friends spend way too much compiling and have all their applications in the weirdest places.
OS X doesn't come with a unix-like package manager out of the box, but Fink or Darwin Ports suffice for installing any of the few thousand available ports with a single command.
Often things like page up/down and home/end don't work in the OSX versions of programs.
Again, just a difference. Having spent years in the windows/linux camp, I agree it's an annoying change and seems unnecessary, but within a couple days you're used to it.
This stuff doesn't have to happen at the expense of the GUI either. My impression has been that Terminal.app is more of an accident than an accepted member of the operating system.
Speaking as someone who spends most of his day jumping between Vim.app and Terminal.app, I respectfully disagree. It seems plain at first glance, especially compared to most linux terminals, but I'd argue it's just better designed to hide features you rarely need. The single largest omission it's missing is tabs, which are coming in Leopard. But as an avid screen user, I don't really miss them.
I have an Ubuntu linux box, a WinXP box, and PowerBook on my desk. It's the Mac that is the most enjoyable one to use, by far (the others are for added screen real estate and testing).
Here in Alberta, Canada, they is a booming logging industry (along with the almighty Oil and Gas). I'm an avid camper and kayaker, so I make regular trips to the woods. What disgusts me is that they are chopping down huge areas of trees, but leaving them devastated. They don't replant seedlings in the areas they log!
One example of thousands (just zoom out and scan around - it goes on for as long as you'd like to look).
I've personally seen maybe 0.1% of those checkerboard areas that have seedlings, and those were obviously planted at least 10 years ago judging on their sizes. The rest are simply cleared out, with the exception of the occasional lone tree type they didn't want. It's very sad to see.
I have no problem with logging in general, as we need wood for all sorts of industries. But not replanting what is by definition a renewable resource, is rather shortsighted.
In contrast, in the medical profession, there is often no way to have the knowledge to fix a problem without asking someone who's read all the important textbooks and has experience dealing with similar issues in other patients. There is no dialog to read, no GUI to explore to find the right option, so we are left with no choice but to either consult textbooks which we may not have access to, or to ask a professional.
Agreed, and another difference between IT and the medial professions (and mechanical, etc), is that you are often encouraged to NOT experiment, as doing so can actively harm what it is you're trying to fix. Although this can apply with computers, these days there is almost always a way to UNDO what you just did, and if not, an obvious warning is presented.
According to the FreeBSD man page for ls, "An ls command appeared in Version 1 AT&T UNIX." So I think it's been around pretty much from the beginning.
echo * actually came in quite handy once. I meant to type:
# rm -rf/home/user/tmp
but what came out was:
# rm -rf / home/user/tmp
I caught my mistake a few seconds later, but not after rm happily removed my entire/lib directory. It's a really good way to learn about shared libraries on unix!
(hint: ls is dynamically linked to files in/lib. No more/lib, no more ls, and about a hundred other rather handy commands. But echo still works!)
Probably a good example of why running commands as root is generally not a good idea...
The FCC is demanding business records from both companies [TeleSpoof and NuFone], as well as the name of every customer that has used TeleSpoof, the date they used it and the number of phone calls they made.
Dated February 24th, the FCC letter gives TeleSpoof 20 calendar days to respond.
I suspect they'll target more of these kinds of services, so you're probably safest setting up your own PBX at home.
I'm a shaw user in Calgary. BT works most of the time, but I think they have been playing with the Ellacoya tech quite a bit over the past months. Quite frequently, if I'm running more than one torrent, I'll lose my entire connection for a few minutes at a time (ALL traffic, not just bittorrent).
If BT traffic was just set to alower priority than other traffic, such that BT traffic would still run quick if the pipes could handle it, I wouldn't mind so much. But if they automatically cap it to a tiny level (like they have in areas of Vancouver), or worse DROP everything intermittently like I'm experiencing, it's unacceptable. It sucks to have to wait a few minutes, then reestablish IM, SSH connections, flush DNS caches, etc.
You just described exactly where I was at earlier this year. I had the unfortunate experience of maintaining a Mac lab in highschool, and used a few during my university years as well. All pre-OSX days. I couldn't stand working on them, with their horrible multitasking and memory management. I just didn't get the appeal of the Mac when compared to Unix or even Windows.
But after hearing all the fan-boys on this and other sites, and doing a fair bit of research into Mac OSX, I figured it was time to try out a powerbook.
After a few months of using it exclusively, I can't stand working with Windows or even KDE/Gnome now. A stock OSX Tiger install is incredibly useful (Exposé, Spotlight, iLife, Dashboard, and all that BSD goodness through Terminal.app). But after installing a few amazing (and free) utilities, it's the closest to desktop utopia I've ever been:
QuickSilver - The most useful app I've ever used - hard to describe, but think of it as a command-line interface to the GUI (some use it as just an application launcher, but it's so much more).
Fink - A BSD Ports implementation for OSX - think of Debian and Gentoo meets OSX - thousands of F/OSS apps just a command away from installing
XAMPP - Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl in a simple to install and run package.
VLC - video watching without having to worry about installing dozens of codecs.
Never thought I'd say it, but I guess I'm one of the fan-boys now.
I still have a Windows box for gaming (although I have to admit there are far more games available for OSX than I imagined), and a few Linux boxes for serving, development, routing, etc. Although I now have all my development stuff running locally on my powerbook, so the linux boxes are less useful these days.
My message to people on the fence about switiching: give it a shot. It's not perfect, but it's leaps and bounds ahead of anything else.
I used to laugh at the fools who got conned out of their money too. But after reading TFA, it seems they have various other scams that have little to do with monetary greed.
For example, they'll pretend to be a woman from Britan. After a month or two of messaging back and forth, building up a love affair with the target, the "woman" goes on vacation to Nigeria and gets in legal trouble, needing money to save her. Or gets her passport stolen and needs money to bribe the corrupt officials to return home.
After corresponding with someone online for a month or more, and they were in sudden desperate need of your help, I can see how it might be hard to flag it as a scam.
Re:Why are we hiding from the police, daddy?
on
Vim 6.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
For a programmer, who spends 7.5 hours a work day using a text editor, it's probably worth it to use the most effective editor, even if it takes a couple of months to get to speed on the tool. (Note: most people learn enough vi to get by in a couple of days.)
I think you can "get by" in vi more quickly than a couple of days. If vim is installed, type "vimtutor" at the commandline. After 30-60 minutes, you'll have a working understand of how vim (and vi) works, and with a bit more practice the two-mode operation becomes second nature.
But it does takes weeks/months/years of use to really master it. I try to take a few hours per month to visit various VIM tips pages and learn something new.
This works for now. However when everyone moves to it, it won't help at all.
Not entirely true; it still has the potential to remove a LOT of spam if used in conjunction with other anti-spam techniques, even if every spammer in the world sends email using proper SMTP standards.
This is because the email will be held for at least 1 hour (can be configured for longer) before it can be delivered. By that time, it's highly likely that the spam email has been tagged by most RBL-type lists, so when it does get through, the anti-spam software can compare it (and the originating server) against the RBL lists and deny it then.
And as another post said, it at the very least increases the resources needed to send the email. The resources on the receiving end are quite minimal (a bit of disk space for the cache of "denied" emails, and a trivial amount of network/cpu when the spam first tries to make it through), but for the spammer it's much worse because of the volume they send. The higher the cost of sending email, the less lucritive it becomes, and hopefully we can push a few of them out of the "market" as a result.
Ok, I missed the boat on this thread by 10 days, but just in case someone stumbles across your post and actually believes Gator is harmless, I respectfully disagree.
It's about as deceptive as any other spyware/malware crap in existance. It commonly installs itself using "drive-by-downloads", monitors EVERY site you visit and sends those back to Claria, pops up windows on random intervals or when you visit a competitors site, and other very questionable tactics.
It can also be very difficult to remove once your system is infected (The actual "Gator" part isn't _that_ hard to uninstall, but the spyware part of it, called GAIN, buries itself very deep).
See here for more info, or just do a google search for Gator or GAIN.
I'd expect that Google has better figures on where people go to from Google's search pages than anyone else.
I've always wondered about this. A lot of sites and search engines will have each URL point back to a redirect script on their site, so that they can track the clicks. Others will use some javascript to do the same thing.
Google does neither, so how would they know what people are clicking on? It seems to me to be incredibly valuable data, especially for a search engine. They could weed out the obvious spam links because so few would be clicking on them.
If you're referring to the sites that google's adding the prefetch links for, then no - since there's no "clicking" happening for anything but the result page. If anything, the impression to click ratios will go down, because the page (and the google image ads on it) are being loaded, but the client will never click on it because he never saw it.
If you're referring to potential click-fraud that a malicious site may do by adding a bunch of "prefetch" links on their page that points to the ad, I seriously doubt it, since no one but the client's machine knows what the links are (since I believe they're loaded at the time the image is generated).
Perhaps an enterprising fraudster may write some clever javascript that waits for the google ad to load, and then generates the prelinks - but I doubt the browser would then notice the change and go prefetch them. Besides, it'd be easier to just make an invisible frame and set it's href location. But again, I doubt you can dynamically figure out what the google ad click URLs are with javascript alone.
Thank you! That may be the single most useful CSS tip I've encountered over the past year. Unbelievable (and somewhat embarassing) that I haven't ran into in over 3 CSS books and countless CSS articles.
Is it actually part of the standard, and if so, any idea how compatible it is on the various browsers? (I did see your comment about NN4 and IE below, but I'm curious about Opera, Konq, etc).
This can only be a good thing. Mozilla/Firefox is open source. Should Google suddenly turn "evil" as a lot of people are speculating, we can always fork a new one from the last untainted version and start from there. Until that day, if it comes, Firefox gains financial support and another big backer. So what's the problem?
Re:JS / HTML graphics: iWon Prize Machine
on
Mapping Google Maps
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Although this doesn't talk to a server while it's running, it's still the most impressive DHTML app I've ever seen: DHTML Lemmings.
Really opened my eyes to the possibilities of what JavaScript/DOM can do. Glad to see Google, iWon, and other sites finally starting to make use of it.
[On smoking] Ishmael: You should try to quit. They say its bad for your heart, your lungs. It quickens the aging process. Roy: Who's done more research than the good people at the American Tobacco Industry? They say its harmless. Why would they lie? If you're dead, you can't smoke.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with Git is the utter lack of visualization, plugins, and integration with other tools.
For example, we use Fisheye as a web-interface to our SVN repository - it's a great way to watch the codebase, or query it to drill down to see specific changes. There's an svn-git gateway tool, but it's rather rudamentary.
If there was a similar tool, plus a proper Eclipse plugin, I think we'd make the switch. Git's speed is just unbelievably fast.
But other times it has spawned new religions.
But remember kids, never mix calculus and alcohol. Don't drink and derive!
I have an Ubuntu linux box, a WinXP box, and PowerBook on my desk. It's the Mac that is the most enjoyable one to use, by far (the others are for added screen real estate and testing).
Here in Alberta, Canada, they is a booming logging industry (along with the almighty Oil and Gas). I'm an avid camper and kayaker, so I make regular trips to the woods. What disgusts me is that they are chopping down huge areas of trees, but leaving them devastated. They don't replant seedlings in the areas they log!
One example of thousands (just zoom out and scan around - it goes on for as long as you'd like to look).
I've personally seen maybe 0.1% of those checkerboard areas that have seedlings, and those were obviously planted at least 10 years ago judging on their sizes. The rest are simply cleared out, with the exception of the occasional lone tree type they didn't want. It's very sad to see.
I have no problem with logging in general, as we need wood for all sorts of industries. But not replanting what is by definition a renewable resource, is rather shortsighted.
echo * actually came in quite handy once. I meant to type:
/home/user/tmp
/lib directory. It's a really good way to learn about shared libraries on unix!
/lib. No more /lib, no more ls, and about a hundred other rather handy commands. But echo still works!)
# rm -rf
but what came out was:
# rm -rf / home/user/tmp
I caught my mistake a few seconds later, but not after rm happily removed my entire
(hint: ls is dynamically linked to files in
Probably a good example of why running commands as root is generally not a good idea...
I'm a shaw user in Calgary. BT works most of the time, but I think they have been playing with the Ellacoya tech quite a bit over the past months. Quite frequently, if I'm running more than one torrent, I'll lose my entire connection for a few minutes at a time (ALL traffic, not just bittorrent).
If BT traffic was just set to alower priority than other traffic, such that BT traffic would still run quick if the pipes could handle it, I wouldn't mind so much. But if they automatically cap it to a tiny level (like they have in areas of Vancouver), or worse DROP everything intermittently like I'm experiencing, it's unacceptable. It sucks to have to wait a few minutes, then reestablish IM, SSH connections, flush DNS caches, etc.
But after hearing all the fan-boys on this and other sites, and doing a fair bit of research into Mac OSX, I figured it was time to try out a powerbook.
After a few months of using it exclusively, I can't stand working with Windows or even KDE/Gnome now. A stock OSX Tiger install is incredibly useful (Exposé, Spotlight, iLife, Dashboard, and all that BSD goodness through Terminal.app). But after installing a few amazing (and free) utilities, it's the closest to desktop utopia I've ever been:
Never thought I'd say it, but I guess I'm one of the fan-boys now.
I still have a Windows box for gaming (although I have to admit there are far more games available for OSX than I imagined), and a few Linux boxes for serving, development, routing, etc. Although I now have all my development stuff running locally on my powerbook, so the linux boxes are less useful these days.
My message to people on the fence about switiching: give it a shot. It's not perfect, but it's leaps and bounds ahead of anything else.
You, sir, have just given me a new sig. Cheers.
For example, they'll pretend to be a woman from Britan. After a month or two of messaging back and forth, building up a love affair with the target, the "woman" goes on vacation to Nigeria and gets in legal trouble, needing money to save her. Or gets her passport stolen and needs money to bribe the corrupt officials to return home.
After corresponding with someone online for a month or more, and they were in sudden desperate need of your help, I can see how it might be hard to flag it as a scam.
But it does takes weeks/months/years of use to really master it. I try to take a few hours per month to visit various VIM tips pages and learn something new.
This is because the email will be held for at least 1 hour (can be configured for longer) before it can be delivered. By that time, it's highly likely that the spam email has been tagged by most RBL-type lists, so when it does get through, the anti-spam software can compare it (and the originating server) against the RBL lists and deny it then.
And as another post said, it at the very least increases the resources needed to send the email. The resources on the receiving end are quite minimal (a bit of disk space for the cache of "denied" emails, and a trivial amount of network/cpu when the spam first tries to make it through), but for the spammer it's much worse because of the volume they send. The higher the cost of sending email, the less lucritive it becomes, and hopefully we can push a few of them out of the "market" as a result.
It's about as deceptive as any other spyware/malware crap in existance. It commonly installs itself using "drive-by-downloads", monitors EVERY site you visit and sends those back to Claria, pops up windows on random intervals or when you visit a competitors site, and other very questionable tactics.
It can also be very difficult to remove once your system is infected (The actual "Gator" part isn't _that_ hard to uninstall, but the spyware part of it, called GAIN, buries itself very deep).
See here for more info, or just do a google search for Gator or GAIN.
Kind of like the guy who put up NWA's Straight Outta Compton, but reduced to just the explicit content. (warning: flash content)
I've always wondered about this. A lot of sites and search engines will have each URL point back to a redirect script on their site, so that they can track the clicks. Others will use some javascript to do the same thing.
Google does neither, so how would they know what people are clicking on? It seems to me to be incredibly valuable data, especially for a search engine. They could weed out the obvious spam links because so few would be clicking on them.
If you're referring to potential click-fraud that a malicious site may do by adding a bunch of "prefetch" links on their page that points to the ad, I seriously doubt it, since no one but the client's machine knows what the links are (since I believe they're loaded at the time the image is generated).
Perhaps an enterprising fraudster may write some clever javascript that waits for the google ad to load, and then generates the prelinks - but I doubt the browser would then notice the change and go prefetch them. Besides, it'd be easier to just make an invisible frame and set it's href location. But again, I doubt you can dynamically figure out what the google ad click URLs are with javascript alone.
Done
Is it actually part of the standard, and if so, any idea how compatible it is on the various browsers? (I did see your comment about NN4 and IE below, but I'm curious about Opera, Konq, etc).
This can only be a good thing. Mozilla/Firefox is open source. Should Google suddenly turn "evil" as a lot of people are speculating, we can always fork a new one from the last untainted version and start from there. Until that day, if it comes, Firefox gains financial support and another big backer. So what's the problem?
Really opened my eyes to the possibilities of what JavaScript/DOM can do. Glad to see Google, iWon, and other sites finally starting to make use of it.
But it'd take them even less time to make a copy of a physical key.
[On smoking]
Ishmael: You should try to quit. They say its bad for your heart, your lungs. It quickens the aging process.
Roy: Who's done more research than the good people at the American Tobacco Industry? They say its harmless. Why would they lie? If you're dead, you can't smoke.