[...]it was called vi, and it didn't have any of this fruity syntax highlighting, and if you wanted to navigate around a document you had to use h,j,k,l, not those hand-holding arrow keys
When I came to Unix, although I had a DOS PC by then, my
main computer had been a ZX Spectrum. The transition from 5, 6, 7, 8 (for left, down, up, right) to h...l was completely natural.
(I'd be interested if anywhere documents it as something other than coincidence...)
...once you've written a shell script that pipes one
function's output into another's input and had the epiphany
that this is something a bit special, the world's your
oyster really.
Is it me, or is it only the title (and some commenters,
perhaps) that suggest this? Phrases like "commonly accepted use",
"wikiclaims", "wikitruth", "received truth/wisdom", and "appeal to authority" (did I even see "de facto" in its proper perjorative sense somewhere?) are well chosen, quoted in the summary, and highlight the equating of Wikipedia articles with "the truth" for the fallacy it is.
If readers sometimes look to it for truth, well, they're misusing it.
[Novell Btrieve (B-tree based database library)]:
The scary thing about Btrieve was that each month the rate of growth of the known/fixed bug list seemed to be increasing, although the product itself seemed pretty stable in our use at least.
But presumably you could search the list *really* quickly!
Reminds me of a conversation prompted by the University of Leeds
computing staff passing round a *really* old department brochure
in the pub. One of the IS mature students looked at the big
square box in the middle of the room, and queried "is that a
CD-ROM drive?"
"CD-ROM that early in the 80's?" said I, "nah. That'd be an
LP-ROM drive".
It would be interesting to dig deeper into the return numbers and find out if it was problems with Linux in general or the specific OS installed on the returned devices. I believe the Linux in general issues can be addressed, but the device specific OS issues will be more difficult.
People are upset: no surprise there. That MSI are investigating the alternatives a little more thoroughly for next time round: that's what you'd hope for.
A quarter century ago they talked about how computers were going to give us "the paperless office" but the computers generate more paper than all the Xerox machines there were before computers. My office is awash with paper.
Or, as we were told in a Professional Development lecture, "the paperless office is as about as likely as the paperless toilet"
(quote attributed to Keith Davidson of Xplor International).
...I didn't know it at the time, but Google just proved the
suspicion I had all along that it was a bit of a
cack handed argument...
I never got a good explanation of why black on white is good (think original Apple Mac), vs. white on black is bad (original IBM CGA).
I'd have thought both have their respective advantages. When I code, I don't want the other windows on the screen to be a distraction; when I'm taking a break to check on email, I don't care whether this is the case.
I have light-on-dark for the former, and dark-on-light for the
latter - and Ihlosi's depth-of-focus explanation supports why it is I find this works... and maybe switching between the two helps eliminate strain over the day as well.
Very useful tip. I was still using www.dilbert.com/comics/...
for a variety of strips, which now goes to a dilbert-based
404 page rather than the standard comics.com one. I'd not
seen it before, and it's worth a read!
I've always thought that the eyes that follow your mouse around were an essential feature to an OS.
Why not? It's possibly the only useful Assistant anyone invented!
"I see you're trying to locate the mouse pointer.
Don't worry, I'm keeping an eye on it for you!"
[...]Copyright extension and rigorous enforcement cause trouble, too.
Indeed, were it not for that, I could quote the lyrics of "Trouble in River City" from Music Man to make my point, provide a link to the MP3 (or Ogg) and maybe someone would download the song and decide to go buy the CD, or even the DVD
I'm just a dreamer...
Maybe. But you're not the only one.
(Oh, wait!...looks over shoulder nervously, listening for sirens...)
And, wouldn't 50 years or longer loan terms have shown this before now?
You'd have thought so, although it's a somewhat minor problem as
long as you can store the date for the next meeting successfully....recalls the local bowling alley League Coordinator stating
"Y2K year rollover problems? With the PDP11-based scoring system
we recently* retired, we've been dealing with that sort of thing
for some time now".
I wouldn't worry about tacitly supporting Microsoft via Novell either. Now that innovators like Asus and Nokia have shown the way, I suspect the day of the big generic desktop Linux is over, and manufacturers will shrink-fit versions of Linux onto their own hardware.
(Personally, I like the fact it has some promise to be more
WMA-compatible than my current, buggy, mp3 player - and if it's
not, there might be I can do something about it)
4. Timex Sinclair 1000 (1982)
[...]Due to the keyboard's diminutive size, Sinclair developed a scheme of assigning multiple BASIC keyword commands for each key, so users would have to press only one key (such as P for "PRINT") instead of typing out the entire command[...]
Nonsense. Who researched this?!!
Due to limited RAM, Sinclair Research designed their
early machines to have all the BASIC keywords assigned to
characters outside the 32-127 (ASCII) range, with various key
combinations/sequences producing them; this allowed
programs to be really small. Consequently (and by also making
the BASIC "editor" reject syntactically-incorrect lines), the
interpreter RAM requirements shrank from not needing code
to do the job of tokenisation, and there was a speed increase
from the avoidance of testing syntax errors at run time.
Writing large machine code programs was somewhat similar:
you'd convert the assembly mnemonics to hex, entered them into
REM statements in a BASIC program, and use a small amount of
code that lived in RAM (the printer buffer was a good candidate
since you rarely used it at the same time)... all in the name
of transferring this directly to the intended address.
Wonderfully effective, but definitely hoop-jumping in the
extreme. I can still do some of the conversions in my head to
this day...:/
(now half grossed out thanks to this prompting me to
think of goatse at work, and half impressed that goatse in
two bytes is pretty impressive compression...)
Slashdot Mirror
[...]it was called vi, and it didn't have any of this fruity syntax highlighting, and if you wanted to navigate around a document you had to use h,j,k,l, not those hand-holding arrow keys
When I came to Unix, although I had a DOS PC by then, my main computer had been a ZX Spectrum. The transition from 5, 6, 7, 8 (for left, down, up, right) to h...l was completely natural.
(I'd be interested if anywhere documents it as something other than coincidence...)
cleartool ci -nc `cat`
A pipe (as I hint at elsewhere) through while ... read would reduce that:
cleartool lsco -cview -me -r -s | while read FILE ; do cleartool ci -nc ${FILE} ; done
...once you've written a shell script that pipes one function's output into another's input and had the epiphany that this is something a bit special, the world's your oyster really.
Related contribution to "Unix koans":
$ ( echo 'egg' ; echo 'chicken' ) | sort
chicken
egg
...and then stump people (briefly) with:
$ ( echo 'egg' ; echo 'chicken' ) | dd 2>/dev/null | sort | dd 2>/dev/null
chicken
egg
$ ( echo 'egg' ; echo 'chicken' ) | dd conv=ebcdic 2>/dev/null | sort | dd conv=ascii 2>/dev/null
egg
chicken
cal 9 1752
WHAT DO WE WANT? "Eleven days back!"
WHEN DO WE WANT THEM? "...!!"
Surely "In Soviet Russia... TV turns you off".
(...well, except it's exactly the same here!!!)
Wikipedia hasn't redefined truth.
Is it me, or is it only the title (and some commenters, perhaps) that suggest this? Phrases like "commonly accepted use", "wikiclaims", "wikitruth", "received truth/wisdom", and "appeal to authority" (did I even see "de facto" in its proper perjorative sense somewhere?) are well chosen, quoted in the summary, and highlight the equating of Wikipedia articles with "the truth" for the fallacy it is.
If readers sometimes look to it for truth, well, they're misusing it.
Amen to that, pretty much
[Novell Btrieve (B-tree based database library)]: The scary thing about Btrieve was that each month the rate of growth of the known/fixed bug list seemed to be increasing, although the product itself seemed pretty stable in our use at least.
But presumably you could search the list *really* quickly!
Make sure to provide support for this!
Reminds me of a conversation prompted by the University of Leeds computing staff passing round a *really* old department brochure in the pub. One of the IS mature students looked at the big square box in the middle of the room, and queried "is that a CD-ROM drive?"
"CD-ROM that early in the 80's?" said I, "nah. That'd be an LP-ROM drive".
The look on my face spoiled it ... eventually!
It would be interesting to dig deeper into the return numbers and find out if it was problems with Linux in general or the specific OS installed on the returned devices. I believe the Linux in general issues can be addressed, but the device specific OS issues will be more difficult.
Agreed. For instance, here's a suggestion MSI's SuSE port doesn't have webcam drivers that work, and another that their preinstalled OpenOffice might not have been ready.
People are upset: no surprise there. That MSI are investigating the alternatives a little more thoroughly for next time round: that's what you'd hope for.
From http://www.iau.org/public_press/news/release/iau0807/: the object previously known as 2003 EL61 is to be classified as the fifth dwarf planet in the Solar System and named Haumea
From your own Wikipedia link: A plutoid is a trans-Neptunian dwarf planet[ or ...]
Eoin Colfer 1 Priory Hall, [...]
If he's found lain dead in a stagnant pool tomorrow, we'll be considering it your fault (whoever you are...)
A quarter century ago they talked about how computers were going to give us "the paperless office" but the computers generate more paper than all the Xerox machines there were before computers. My office is awash with paper.
Or, as we were told in a Professional Development lecture, "the paperless office is as about as likely as the paperless toilet" (quote attributed to Keith Davidson of Xplor International).
Forget slayer, I wanna be Willow's girlfriend!!!
If that role's gone, I'll take Watcher.
...after all, they do say that to get "this good" takes AGES
(geekily noting that extravert would actually be the Jungian [and therefore technically correct] spelling but for this other word).
I never got a good explanation of why black on white is good (think original Apple Mac), vs. white on black is bad (original IBM CGA).
I'd have thought both have their respective advantages. When I code, I don't want the other windows on the screen to be a distraction; when I'm taking a break to check on email, I don't care whether this is the case. I have light-on-dark for the former, and dark-on-light for the latter - and Ihlosi's depth-of-focus explanation supports why it is I find this works ... and maybe switching between the two helps eliminate strain over the day as well.
...that web sites should be flash.
Stood for Fast-Loading, Accessible, Searchable Hypertext though.
(Hmm, suddenly, it's only half the joke it used to be!)
here's the html version:
http://www.comics.com/comics/dilbert/archive/index.html
Very useful tip. I was still using www.dilbert.com/comics/... for a variety of strips, which now goes to a dilbert-based 404 page rather than the standard comics.com one. I'd not seen it before, and it's worth a read!
Why not? It's possibly the only useful Assistant anyone invented!
"I see you're trying to locate the mouse pointer. Don't worry, I'm keeping an eye on it for you!"
Maybe. But you're not the only one.
(Oh, wait! ...looks over shoulder nervously, listening for sirens...)
Nah, can't be measuring "peak" efficiency - it's not including blood alcohol level in the calculation ;)
You'd have thought so, although it's a somewhat minor problem as long as you can store the date for the next meeting successfully. ...recalls the local bowling alley League Coordinator stating
"Y2K year rollover problems? With the PDP11-based scoring system
we recently* retired, we've been dealing with that sort of thing
for some time now".
*in 1997!!!
It will be interesting to see how the story of the Eee pans out, since it runs Xandros and they too have a "Novell style" deal. There's some concern here too.
(Personally, I like the fact it has some promise to be more WMA-compatible than my current, buggy, mp3 player - and if it's not, there might be I can do something about it)
Nonsense. Who researched this?!!
Due to limited RAM, Sinclair Research designed their early machines to have all the BASIC keywords assigned to characters outside the 32-127 (ASCII) range, with various key combinations/sequences producing them; this allowed programs to be really small. Consequently (and by also making the BASIC "editor" reject syntactically-incorrect lines), the interpreter RAM requirements shrank from not needing code to do the job of tokenisation, and there was a speed increase from the avoidance of testing syntax errors at run time.
Writing large machine code programs was somewhat similar: you'd convert the assembly mnemonics to hex, entered them into REM statements in a BASIC program, and use a small amount of code that lived in RAM (the printer buffer was a good candidate since you rarely used it at the same time) ... all in the name
of transferring this directly to the intended address.
Wonderfully effective, but definitely hoop-jumping in the
extreme. I can still do some of the conversions in my head to
this day... :/
...not just your face.
(now half grossed out thanks to this prompting me to think of goatse at work, and half impressed that goatse in two bytes is pretty impressive compression...)