Corel's track record with these "pilot" programs is very, very poor. They release lots of software for a release or so. It's buggy because it was pushed out of development to make the market window. They don't make any patches, because they're waiting to see if the market will snap up the software before devoting more resources. The market steers clear because the product is a buggy piece of junk. Corel drops the software, claiming the market wouldn't support it.
They do the same thing on Windows, but look at their Linux examples. WP7 was pretty solid. It was developed and supported by another company. WP8 was developed by that same company (SDLC, iirc), but transfered to Corel for development right before release. As a result, it had problems. It was supposed to ship with new printer drivers SDLC had developed to take better advantage of ghostscript and higher-res pictures. They weren't there. It had a huge, major bug where placing text over images could slow it down insanely. Don't even try making an image background! There were a few other minor bugs I don't recall.
If you spent a few hundred dollars on the server edition of WP for Linux, did you ever get things fixed? Of course not. If you bought the personal version, did they get fixed? Nope. Those bugs were fixed, but the only fixed version was released as part of Corel Linux OS Deluxe, and it wasn't even publicised as being fixed.
Still, WP8 was the best release they made for actually editing documents. Naturally, with WP9/WPO2000, they got rid of all that infrastructure and went with Wine.
What did that buy us? Still more, new bugs. Mostly because their version of Wine was buggy and under constant development. It would periodically crash and you'd have to erase your preferences dir, getting rid of any customization. They made a couple unofficial Wine updates in conjunction with their Corel Graphics release, but never released an official service pack. Which would have helped, since some of the bugs required code fixes in the WP code.
The best way to get WP and Draw running was to get the wine source from their CVS, and futz with the startup scripts to get it working. Except shortly after Draw was released, most of the Linux developers were canned.
Throughout this process, I was a C_Tech volunteer, trying to support these products on their newgroups. People kept coming up with the same bugs and I kept asking the product manager when we'd see a patch. He kept saying he'd like to, but upper management wouldn't approve the work unless they saw the software selling more. Eventually I resigned as a C_Tech when it became clear that there would never be a fix.
This is how Corel operates. They come up with some great idea, throw some money at it, but fail to follow through. I'd like to hope this will be different, but they screwed it up when the competition for a good word processor was much less than it is today, and I don't see them getting it right this time.
If you can bitch about how much worse you can have it than developers, we can bitch about how bad we have it. At least you have the scary devil monastery.
War stories are fun. Don't whine just because they're not about your chosen form of punishment.
I don't know anybody who's learned a real lisp in school. Generally, it's scheme taught with a focus towards recursion and lambda. Scheme is a language which has been intentionally trimmed to be as "pure" as possible.
Lisps which have more built-in functionality aren't covered. Like iteration! OO! All sorts of useful things. Common Lisp is a completely different experience from Scheme. I was taught Scheme in school. Hated it. Now love Common Lisp and even Emacs Lisp (in Emacs, at least).
So I disagree that many programmers have been taught Lisp and dislike it. That's like saying that people have been taught C++ and disliked it when really, they've been taught C or java. (Both in the same family, but very different.)
I recommend picking up a copy of Write Now: A Complete Self Teaching Program for Better Handwriting. It's available from Amazon (affiliate link) or the publisher.
Write Now is a handwriting guide developed for adults. It doesn't have stupid little animals or other kid things, although it does have handwriting trivia all over the place. If your handwriting is so bad you've long since given up and your printing is almost as bad, this is the book for you. It starts off teaching an italic form of printing, which then leads easily into italic cursive. It even has some pages on calligraphy at the end, but the main focus of the book is on developing a quick and legible handwriting. The authors periodically hold seminars for doctors, so it's got to be practical.
I bought it because I haven't actually done cursive in over ten years. Even I had trouble reading my printing. I needed to forget everything I knew and start from scratch. This book is helping, but it's hard to sit down and practice, so my cursive still isn't very usable, but my printing is better.
Only piece of metal I've bent on my 5 leatherman tools is the corkscrew on a Juice. Keep meaning to send it back to get it fixed. It was mostly just a toy, anyway.
But my supertool, Waves, Micra all haven't had any problems. I'd love to know what tools you bent, doing what.
Cook's Illustrated selects recipes and exhaustively tests variations to come up with the easiest or best tasting recipe. They investigate why certain varieties of potatoes are good in different recipes, for instance. They'll explain why you should soak fries in ice water before frying them. They'll explain the tricks in getting the meringue right.
If you want recipes with the best results for the effort or you want to learn the underlying theory, Cook's is great. (They also have a PBS show called America's Test Kitchen.)
Even C compilers these days can optimize tail calls. So if you have a function searching a list, and it will recurse on the sublist if it doesn't find it, and doesn't combine the results of the subcall, gcc and other compilers can output the same code as your loop. You don't blow the stack, you don't incur the costs of a function call. Just a jump.
The recursive version is easier to write and easier to verify, as demonstrated by the fact you can write it without the little pictures. So the recursive version is a win.
Not to mention that if you have to search a linked list of one million nodes, you are using the wrong data structure. A good programmer would know that.
Yes, take a look at The Art of Computer Programming by Knuth. Notice that it's actually called "The Art of Computer Programming." Notice that there's a lot of code in those books, in assembly, along with a lot of math.
Computer Science and programming are not as divorced as many seem to believe. Knuth agrees that it's important to have a full understanding of the higher-level theory aspects as well as how it actually works in machines. Computer scientists can't divorce themselves entirely from computers. If they do, they're like noted architects who come up with fabulous edifices which are unlivable or have serious structural problems.
Agreed. For one more example, managing programs on the TiVo, I often delete things. There are two ways to do this: select the program, arrow to the delete icon, and hit select. Or just hit the clear button.
On the peanut, the arrow is at the top of the remote. The clear button is all the way at the bottom.
News flash: if you couldn't get a small loan on a used car without agreeing this thing, you have bad credit. I just bought a brand new car after living here for 7 months, and didn't have a problem getting financing... even had the dealer trying to convince me that his people could meet the low interest rate I got through my credit union.
The amount of time you've lived in one place is one factor in deciding to loan money, but it's not the only one. And with a high enough credit score, you could walk into the dealership the day after you moved and not have a problem.
I'd suggest requesting a copy of your credit report, and see what's on there. Since you aver that you don't know of any reasons to say you have bad credit, it may be that you have some errors on your report you could have addressed.
Please. X is one of the most painful packages to download and compile oneself. It's big. It needs lots of space to compile. It needs lots of time to compile. It's not just./configure && make && make install, since it's got a moderately Byzantine build system based on Imakefiles, which nearly nobody else uses anymore, so if you have to change build parameters, you have a bit more work/learning to do.
In short, after having kept an XF86 build tree around to stay on the bleeding edge, it's enough of a pain even after you get it going that I don't want to do it again unless I really have to.
If you don't pay for disposable technology, what computer do you buy? They're all worthless after a while. Sure, you can keep replacing components, but after a while, you've replaced everything anyway. What's the difference?
I've had my laptop for over three years now, and plan on getting at least another year out of it. And it means that I can do stuff anywhere in my 3-story house I want to. I can bring it on the road to get programming in when my wife is driving. I can watch DVDs in hotel rooms. It's got a lot of uses, but the fact that I'm not tied to a specific location at home is the reason I have it.
(Now, I wouldn't buy this laptop... Inspirons have low build quality, and I don't want a 9 lb luggable. But that's no indictment against other laptops.)
Except that things like "i = i + 1" vs. "i++" vs "i+=1" are mostly irrelevant today, since that's a very easy thing for compilers to optimize. And they've been optimizing stuff like that for years. Try looking at the asm output from GCC at -O2 on those two statements.
Knuth had reasons for using ASM that were a lot better than that. It does give you a better idea of how things are laid out in memory, because you have to do it yourself. It's easier to do detailed performance analysis of algorithms, because you can get exact cycle counts. (Which in turn helps train your intuition, and tell you how to find out from a CPU's instruction set how it does at various things to tune algorithms.) You can look at how cache affects things.
You might be surprised... often rural communities have faster response than in cities. No traffic, there are often nearby volunteer EMTs stationed all over the place. Sure, it'll take you longer to get to a hospital, but an EMT can stabilize a lot of problems.
Though I agree with you in spirit, at some point you have to stop and consider that if you don't slightly inconvenience people trying to reach you, then you'll inconvenience them by missing their email due to being lost in a cluttered inbox.
I really hope you don't run into that.
I haven't. I receive 700-900 messages a weekday. (Less on weekends.) Bogofilter is very, very good at avoiding false positives. I've had one false positive personal mail, in the time I've used it. (More commercial mail I don't consider spam has fallen in my junk folder. But training remedies the specific cases.) The one false positive was from someone whose sig was really close to spam, and the mail was one sentence.
I haven't gotten any reports of mails I haven't responded to. That's better than I did with spamassassin (pre-bayes).
I also don't worry about a cluttered inbox because my mail is very effectively filtered into folders (gnus is great). My inbox isn't cluttered... only sees 5-10 messages a day.
I post my address unobfuscated, you insensitive clod!
Ditto. Google my address and you'll find it in mailing lists, Usenet, web pages. It's everywhere. It's also about 4 years old, I think.
I don't believe in making people jump through hoops to get in touch with me. And as you've noted, you have to make your email address increasingly more obfuscated to keep it off of lists. And if one of your friends or family gets a virus or sends you an e-card, your address is "contaminated" and you'll get junk.
Instead, I run bogofilter and deal with it. I don't have to constantly send out new addresses to people. If a friend from elementary school wants to look me up, he can find me. (And yes, that's happened.) And people can actually hit "reply" on messages I post. Wow.
Hi, I'm Alan Shutko and I've used Project Gutenberg.
Yes, it's limited to things specifically released or out of copyright. But there's an awful lot there. I've used it so I could do full-text searches on various classes for things, I've read a number of books from it (Tom Swift, mostly, because I only have one hardcover going back that far).
No, it wouldn't. It would perform a "harder" reset than just hitting run-stop, but it wouldn't reset the machine. It was easily trapped by software and wouldn't work in most applications.
Which is why so many of us had reset switches on a fast-load type card or off (iirc) the user port.
The question is, how long should they be keeping backups? Unless they have backups more than five months old, they're useless to check against.
And according to their md5sum list, they do have backups for a lot of this. But since they were cracked in March, anything uploaded since then might have been compromised before the backups were run that night.
Disclaimer: I loathe mensa, and view it as an organization that feeds arrogance and promoting the unimportant.
It's a social club. What's the problem if a bunch of people want to hang out together? You don't seem to be complaining about any of the triple-nine clubs, or the ones that are even more selective.
You've probably met some asshole Mensans, but they would probably be just as unpleasant were there no Mensa.
You can have good social skills and still be an introvert, just as you can work hard and be a good athelete.
But if you're really an introvert, you don't get as much out of large groups as people who are really extroverts. Yes, you can feel drained. Doesn't mean you can't enjoy the situation, or that you are a hopeless nerd without social skills.
It sounds like you weren't temperamentally an introvert. You were just a schmuck with poor social skills. You fixed those, and found a place you were comfortable. Great! Me, the place I'm most comfortable is without constant socialization. Parties? Great! Hanging with friends? Great! Meeting new people? Well, can be great, depending on the people. 8^) But I like some low-socialization time afterwards to recenter myself.
Remember: it's not about being "normal" or being a geek. It's about the doses you enjoy socialization. And it's not a binary choice, but a continuum. People can be fairly balanced, can be slightly tilted, or be at the extremes.
Cards this big are targetted at people with Digital SLRs which output big files. NEF files come out of my camera 7.8MiB each. I could fit about 15 pics on your card, and I have an older camera!
Slashdot Mirror
And when it fails, they'll blame Linux.
Corel's track record with these "pilot" programs is very, very poor. They release lots of software for a release or so. It's buggy because it was pushed out of development to make the market window. They don't make any patches, because they're waiting to see if the market will snap up the software before devoting more resources. The market steers clear because the product is a buggy piece of junk. Corel drops the software, claiming the market wouldn't support it.
They do the same thing on Windows, but look at their Linux examples. WP7 was pretty solid. It was developed and supported by another company. WP8 was developed by that same company (SDLC, iirc), but transfered to Corel for development right before release. As a result, it had problems. It was supposed to ship with new printer drivers SDLC had developed to take better advantage of ghostscript and higher-res pictures. They weren't there. It had a huge, major bug where placing text over images could slow it down insanely. Don't even try making an image background! There were a few other minor bugs I don't recall.
If you spent a few hundred dollars on the server edition of WP for Linux, did you ever get things fixed? Of course not. If you bought the personal version, did they get fixed? Nope. Those bugs were fixed, but the only fixed version was released as part of Corel Linux OS Deluxe, and it wasn't even publicised as being fixed.
Still, WP8 was the best release they made for actually editing documents. Naturally, with WP9/WPO2000, they got rid of all that infrastructure and went with Wine.
What did that buy us? Still more, new bugs. Mostly because their version of Wine was buggy and under constant development. It would periodically crash and you'd have to erase your preferences dir, getting rid of any customization. They made a couple unofficial Wine updates in conjunction with their Corel Graphics release, but never released an official service pack. Which would have helped, since some of the bugs required code fixes in the WP code.
The best way to get WP and Draw running was to get the wine source from their CVS, and futz with the startup scripts to get it working. Except shortly after Draw was released, most of the Linux developers were canned.
Throughout this process, I was a C_Tech volunteer, trying to support these products on their newgroups. People kept coming up with the same bugs and I kept asking the product manager when we'd see a patch. He kept saying he'd like to, but upper management wouldn't approve the work unless they saw the software selling more. Eventually I resigned as a C_Tech when it became clear that there would never be a fix.
This is how Corel operates. They come up with some great idea, throw some money at it, but fail to follow through. I'd like to hope this will be different, but they screwed it up when the competition for a good word processor was much less than it is today, and I don't see them getting it right this time.
If you can bitch about how much worse you can have it than developers, we can bitch about how bad we have it. At least you have the scary devil monastery.
War stories are fun. Don't whine just because they're not about your chosen form of punishment.
I don't know anybody who's learned a real lisp in school. Generally, it's scheme taught with a focus towards recursion and lambda. Scheme is a language which has been intentionally trimmed to be as "pure" as possible.
Lisps which have more built-in functionality aren't covered. Like iteration! OO! All sorts of useful things. Common Lisp is a completely different experience from Scheme. I was taught Scheme in school. Hated it. Now love Common Lisp and even Emacs Lisp (in Emacs, at least).
So I disagree that many programmers have been taught Lisp and dislike it. That's like saying that people have been taught C++ and disliked it when really, they've been taught C or java. (Both in the same family, but very different.)
I recommend picking up a copy of Write Now: A Complete Self Teaching Program for Better Handwriting. It's available from Amazon (affiliate link) or the publisher.
Write Now is a handwriting guide developed for adults. It doesn't have stupid little animals or other kid things, although it does have handwriting trivia all over the place. If your handwriting is so bad you've long since given up and your printing is almost as bad, this is the book for you. It starts off teaching an italic form of printing, which then leads easily into italic cursive. It even has some pages on calligraphy at the end, but the main focus of the book is on developing a quick and legible handwriting. The authors periodically hold seminars for doctors, so it's got to be practical.
I bought it because I haven't actually done cursive in over ten years. Even I had trouble reading my printing. I needed to forget everything I knew and start from scratch. This book is helping, but it's hard to sit down and practice, so my cursive still isn't very usable, but my printing is better.
Give it a try!
Only piece of metal I've bent on my 5 leatherman tools is the corkscrew on a Juice. Keep meaning to send it back to get it fixed. It was mostly just a toy, anyway.
But my supertool, Waves, Micra all haven't had any problems. I'd love to know what tools you bent, doing what.
Well, it's not free, but it's worth the money.
Cook's Illustrated selects recipes and exhaustively tests variations to come up with the easiest or best tasting recipe. They investigate why certain varieties of potatoes are good in different recipes, for instance. They'll explain why you should soak fries in ice water before frying them. They'll explain the tricks in getting the meringue right.
If you want recipes with the best results for the effort or you want to learn the underlying theory, Cook's is great. (They also have a PBS show called America's Test Kitchen.)
Even C compilers these days can optimize tail calls. So if you have a function searching a list, and it will recurse on the sublist if it doesn't find it, and doesn't combine the results of the subcall, gcc and other compilers can output the same code as your loop. You don't blow the stack, you don't incur the costs of a function call. Just a jump.
The recursive version is easier to write and easier to verify, as demonstrated by the fact you can write it without the little pictures. So the recursive version is a win.
Not to mention that if you have to search a linked list of one million nodes, you are using the wrong data structure. A good programmer would know that.
Yes, take a look at The Art of Computer Programming by Knuth. Notice that it's actually called "The Art of Computer Programming." Notice that there's a lot of code in those books, in assembly, along with a lot of math.
Computer Science and programming are not as divorced as many seem to believe. Knuth agrees that it's important to have a full understanding of the higher-level theory aspects as well as how it actually works in machines. Computer scientists can't divorce themselves entirely from computers. If they do, they're like noted architects who come up with fabulous edifices which are unlivable or have serious structural problems.
Agreed. For one more example, managing programs on the TiVo, I often delete things. There are two ways to do this: select the program, arrow to the delete icon, and hit select. Or just hit the clear button.
On the peanut, the arrow is at the top of the remote. The clear button is all the way at the bottom.
News flash: if you couldn't get a small loan on a used car without agreeing this thing, you have bad credit. I just bought a brand new car after living here for 7 months, and didn't have a problem getting financing... even had the dealer trying to convince me that his people could meet the low interest rate I got through my credit union.
The amount of time you've lived in one place is one factor in deciding to loan money, but it's not the only one. And with a high enough credit score, you could walk into the dealership the day after you moved and not have a problem.
I'd suggest requesting a copy of your credit report, and see what's on there. Since you aver that you don't know of any reasons to say you have bad credit, it may be that you have some errors on your report you could have addressed.
Please. X is one of the most painful packages to download and compile oneself. It's big. It needs lots of space to compile. It needs lots of time to compile. It's not just ./configure && make && make install, since it's got a moderately Byzantine build system based on Imakefiles, which nearly nobody else uses anymore, so if you have to change build parameters, you have a bit more work/learning to do.
In short, after having kept an XF86 build tree around to stay on the bleeding edge, it's enough of a pain even after you get it going that I don't want to do it again unless I really have to.
If you don't pay for disposable technology, what computer do you buy? They're all worthless after a while. Sure, you can keep replacing components, but after a while, you've replaced everything anyway. What's the difference?
I've had my laptop for over three years now, and plan on getting at least another year out of it. And it means that I can do stuff anywhere in my 3-story house I want to. I can bring it on the road to get programming in when my wife is driving. I can watch DVDs in hotel rooms. It's got a lot of uses, but the fact that I'm not tied to a specific location at home is the reason I have it.
(Now, I wouldn't buy this laptop... Inspirons have low build quality, and I don't want a 9 lb luggable. But that's no indictment against other laptops.)
Except that things like "i = i + 1" vs. "i++" vs "i+=1" are mostly irrelevant today, since that's a very easy thing for compilers to optimize. And they've been optimizing stuff like that for years.
Try looking at the asm output from GCC at -O2 on those two statements.
Knuth had reasons for using ASM that were a lot better than that. It does give you a better idea of how things are laid out in memory, because you have to do it yourself. It's easier to do detailed performance analysis of algorithms, because you can get exact cycle counts. (Which in turn helps train your intuition, and tell you how to find out from a CPU's instruction set how it does at various things to tune algorithms.) You can look at how cache affects things.
Take a look at his reasons.
You might be surprised... often rural communities have faster response than in cities. No traffic, there are often nearby volunteer EMTs stationed all over the place. Sure, it'll take you longer to get to a hospital, but an EMT can stabilize a lot of problems.
Hmm... which is more distracting? A front passenger checking email on a computer, or having kids in the car?
My guess is you've inadvertantly installed some malware which is hooking into Google links and sending you somewhere else.
I've only seen this behavior on Windows, and after clearing things up with one of those programs which removes malware, the problem went away.
Though I agree with you in spirit, at some point you have to stop and consider that if you don't slightly inconvenience people trying to reach you, then you'll inconvenience them by missing their email due to being lost in a cluttered inbox.
I really hope you don't run into that.
I haven't. I receive 700-900 messages a weekday. (Less on weekends.) Bogofilter is very, very good at avoiding false positives. I've had one false positive personal mail, in the time I've used it. (More commercial mail I don't consider spam has fallen in my junk folder. But training remedies the specific cases.) The one false positive was from someone whose sig was really close to spam, and the mail was one sentence.
I haven't gotten any reports of mails I haven't responded to. That's better than I did with spamassassin (pre-bayes).
I also don't worry about a cluttered inbox because my mail is very effectively filtered into folders (gnus is great). My inbox isn't cluttered... only sees 5-10 messages a day.
So, really, it is possible.
I post my address unobfuscated, you insensitive clod!
Ditto. Google my address and you'll find it in mailing lists, Usenet, web pages. It's everywhere. It's also about 4 years old, I think.
I don't believe in making people jump through hoops to get in touch with me. And as you've noted, you have to make your email address increasingly more obfuscated to keep it off of lists. And if one of your friends or family gets a virus or sends you an e-card, your address is "contaminated" and you'll get junk.
Instead, I run bogofilter and deal with it. I don't have to constantly send out new addresses to people. If a friend from elementary school wants to look me up, he can find me. (And yes, that's happened.) And people can actually hit "reply" on messages I post. Wow.
Hi, I'm Alan Shutko and I've used Project Gutenberg.
Yes, it's limited to things specifically released or out of copyright. But there's an awful lot there. I've used it so I could do full-text searches on various classes for things, I've read a number of books from it (Tom Swift, mostly, because I only have one hardcover going back that far).
No, it wouldn't. It would perform a "harder" reset than just hitting run-stop, but it wouldn't reset the machine. It was easily trapped by software and wouldn't work in most applications.
Which is why so many of us had reset switches on a fast-load type card or off (iirc) the user port.
Nobody who's anybody has used Pine since at least 1995 or so. Geez, get with the program!
The question is, how long should they be keeping backups? Unless they have backups more than five months old, they're useless to check against.
And according to their md5sum list, they do have backups for a lot of this. But since they were cracked in March, anything uploaded since then might have been compromised before the backups were run that night.
Good thing they're handling it and not you.
Disclaimer: I loathe mensa, and view it as an organization that feeds arrogance and promoting the unimportant.
It's a social club. What's the problem if a bunch of people want to hang out together? You don't seem to be complaining about any of the triple-nine clubs, or the ones that are even more selective.
You've probably met some asshole Mensans, but they would probably be just as unpleasant were there no Mensa.
You can have good social skills and still be an introvert, just as you can work hard and be a good athelete.
But if you're really an introvert, you don't get as much out of large groups as people who are really extroverts. Yes, you can feel drained. Doesn't mean you can't enjoy the situation, or that you are a hopeless nerd without social skills.
It sounds like you weren't temperamentally an introvert. You were just a schmuck with poor social skills. You fixed those, and found a place you were comfortable. Great! Me, the place I'm most comfortable is without constant socialization. Parties? Great! Hanging with friends? Great! Meeting new people? Well, can be great, depending on the people. 8^) But I like some low-socialization time afterwards to recenter myself.
Remember: it's not about being "normal" or being a geek. It's about the doses you enjoy socialization. And it's not a binary choice, but a continuum. People can be fairly balanced, can be slightly tilted, or be at the extremes.
Cards this big are targetted at people with Digital SLRs which output big files. NEF files come out of my camera 7.8MiB each. I could fit about 15 pics on your card, and I have an older camera!