Many Slashdot readers are too young to remember Nixon
Don't tell me I haven't done my part for America: I was born, and Nixon -- the corrupt leader of the most powerful country on earth -- resigned the very next day. (I've wondered, though, whether it was something I said, or just the screaming.)
From the article (ya know, that thing you should read before commenting on its contents):
"We have a very straightforward attitude to cheating: We see it; you're gone," Jacobs said. "I will happily sacrifice a small portion of my paying customers to ensure the rest of them have a quality experience."
Kick. Ass. I know nothing about this company or their games, but I like them already.
After hacking around on *nix for years, everything in that book was old news to me. Well, almost everything. Out of 1000+ pages, here's the only trick I had never seen before:
If you have a directory full of files that are precious to you, run "touch./-i" in that directory. This creates an empty file named "-i". Why do this? Because:
If you accidentally "rm *" there, the shell's default collating order while expanding the * will put the "-i" file first in the list, which will then be interpreted by rm as the interactive option, rather than a file.
(I've never used this trick, but I can see how it would be much less hassle than trying to remember to chmod u-w a precious file every time you get done working with it. Refinements on the technique include hardlinking the "-i" file to different directories instead of touch'ing it more than once, to save on inodes.)
(This also assumes that the user is already familiar with any of the half-billion methods of actually deleting a file whose name starts with '-'. This is/the/ most frequently asked FAQ in comp.unix.*.)
There. Now you know the most interesting trick in the whole book, and you don't need to spend the sixty bucks.:-)
I got tired of looking up all of the various -f* and -m* options in gcc. So the Bash completion project now knows how to complete gcc/g++ options, e.g.,
gcc -fomit-fr<TAB>
will complete, and
gcc -f<TAB><TAB>
will list possible completions, etc.
Other shells have had programmable completion for a while now. It's nice to see this feature added to bash, and it's nice to see someone volunteering to collect the widespread completion functions.
What, are people too hung up on the soft-pr0n ch1xs in th0ngs to read the rest of the auqatank page?
#2. Why doesn't the heat from the PC make the water hot enough to kill the fish?
A) The location of the tank is isolated from all the components that generate heat. Several fans are placed in the case as well to move the air though. When the computer has been on for a long period of time, there is a slight increase in the water temperature, but not enough to exceed to livable range of the fish. One of the reasons that I selected the neon tetra was because of it's small size and it's rather large temperature range (23C-28C).
BTW, the "neon tetra" he talks about is the breed of fish, not some kind of four-way processor mod.
If you're serious about typing in Russian, you don't type the control-meta-alt-whacky sequences.
You spend $15 and buy a plastic keyboard overlay, one of those little flexible jobs with the alternate characters printed on them. Change your keymapping -- they make keymap files to match the popular overlay's plastic sheets, I'm told -- and you're done.
Large chunks of the WWII-era plotline in Cryptonomicon are pinned on
precisely this problem (how to make best use of the broken Enigma ciphers without letting Germany know that Enigma has been broken).
Anybody who thinks this is a simple, clear issue should pull his head out of his ass and go read that book. (The book is good regardless, but also goes to show that the problems of the intelligence community haven't changed much.)
Absolutely. Anybody who uses a single compiler on an important project (at least during the development stage) is just begging for problems later on down the road.
Well, yeah, but it only works when you tell the compiler and linker what you're doing. The '#pragma telepathy' extension still hasn't been checked in to the main GCC source tree.:-)
Under Solaris, I do similar things with the uber-kickass watchmalloc library.
ODR is One Definition Rule. It's the clause of the ISO C++ Standard (that's where you'd go to look for it) that says that an entity used in a program must be defined exactly once.
Some of the KDE libs apparently were trying to define things more than once, and have the linker merge them. Which falls outside the realm of C++, and is actually done for some behind-the-scenes things, but not normally, and not by default.
Anyhow, there was a long thread on the gcc list, where the remaining multiple inheritence issues were dealt with, and the ODR problems explained to the good KDE folks. So all should be well there.
Slow startup times remain; that's a different problem.
Yes, GCC 3.1 compiles KDE 3.0 just fine, according to initial prerelease reports. However...
So any word on whether c++ has been fixed?
"C++" as you call it, was doing pretty well. Most of the problem was that the KDE library folks expected to be able to break the ODR and have GNU ld magically fix it for them. (Even open source projects have to follow the rules of the programming language in use, sorry...)
No wonder the roundup showed crappy results. They used GCC 2.95.2, which is three years old and uses a library that's even older.
GCC 3.x uses a rewritten library. I suspect their "library conformance" ratings would be quite different if they'd tested a compiler that's actually supported.
Absolutely. In professional technical circles, Linux's procfs has a well-earned and well-deserved reputation as a random dumping ground for anything which strikes the LKML folks as k3w1. There's a very clearly-written article on the subject buried somewhere in Usenet; I thought I'd saved a copy but cannot find it at the moment.
"Linux is where Solaris was five or 10 years ago."
You make your own cynical comment : )
Okay, I will. How about, "That's pretty accurate, and most anyone who uses both Linux and Solaris on a daily basis will agree."
Possibly not the cynical comment you were looking for:-) but the design and stability of Linux has a long way to go to catch up with Solaris 8. As far as cool'n'nifty user features go, I can just compile the occasional GNU utilities on my Solaris box.
Under NT, disable "Administrator" login, and give an alternate loginname administrator rights. (note: I'm not sure if this can actually be done)
Actually, you could just rename the account. The "home directory" still points to the same directory paths, but those are stored in the registry and can be tweaked if you really feel the need.
Will the bomb-carriers will have their own swarm of bees trained to kill any bees sniffing around in their vicinity?
They won't need to train anything. Just have some other bees, or wasps, or large birds, or my neighbor's dog, or anything else that naturally chases and [tries to] eat bees.
Will they also train the bees to viciously swarm and attack the person carrying the bomb?
They won't be able to train them; they'd have to grow them or gene-splice them or install little patent-lawyer brains in them (i.e., if it moves, attack it). But training them to attack something mobile that isn't threatening the hive probably won't work. Especially if the bees themselves are in the time of year where they're looking for a place to nest -- when threatened, they just leave. It's/after/ they've chosen a place for a nest that they get territorial and need to be viciously exterminated.
Fire up yer browser, point it at the local AnswerBook2 server (or http://docs.sun.com/), and find the System Administrator Collection. Flip down to "SunSHIELD Basic Security Monitor Guide." Read about how to enable auditing.
Then tell it to record full paths, flip the switch, and watch your hard drives fill up in seconds due to the massive amount of auditing information being logged.
Yes, and yes.:-) Depending on where you work, and for which agency and directorate, you may only need a background check, not a formal clearance. But a good starting assumption would be that you'd need a Secret clearance, which isn't too difficult to get as long as you're not an active terrorist.
Wow. Just down in the road in Dayton, OH, those of us on the air force base can't find enough qualified IT people. Have you considered working in civil service for a while? The pay's pretty good at the IT level.
Limericks are not my choice of verse.
Rhyming three lines is horrid, the worst!
Rhyming two lines is fine,
I do that all the time,
But making the third line rhyme is completely out of the question.
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Don't tell me I haven't done my part for America: I was born, and Nixon -- the corrupt leader of the most powerful country on earth -- resigned the very next day. (I've wondered, though, whether it was something I said, or just the screaming.)
From the article (ya know, that thing you should read before commenting on its contents):
Kick. Ass. I know nothing about this company or their games, but I like them already.
After hacking around on *nix for years, everything in that book was old news to me. Well, almost everything. Out of 1000+ pages, here's the only trick I had never seen before:
If you have a directory full of files that are precious to you, run "touch ./-i" in that directory. This creates an empty file named "-i". Why do this? Because:
If you accidentally "rm *" there, the shell's default collating order while expanding the * will put the "-i" file first in the list, which will then be interpreted by rm as the interactive option, rather than a file.
(I've never used this trick, but I can see how it would be much less hassle than trying to remember to chmod u-w a precious file every time you get done working with it. Refinements on the technique include hardlinking the "-i" file to different directories instead of touch'ing it more than once, to save on inodes.)
(This also assumes that the user is already familiar with any of the half-billion methods of actually deleting a file whose name starts with '-'. This is /the/ most frequently asked FAQ in comp.unix.*.)
There. Now you know the most interesting trick in the whole book, and you don't need to spend the sixty bucks. :-)
will complete, and will list possible completions, etc.I got tired of looking up all of the various -f* and -m* options in gcc. So the Bash completion project now knows how to complete gcc/g++ options, e.g.,
Other shells have had programmable completion for a while now. It's nice to see this feature added to bash, and it's nice to see someone volunteering to collect the widespread completion functions.
What, are people too hung up on the soft-pr0n ch1xs in th0ngs to read the rest of the auqatank page?
BTW, the "neon tetra" he talks about is the breed of fish, not some kind of four-way processor mod.
Treason never prospers,
What's the reason?
For if it doth prosper,
None dare call it treason!
I've forgotten who said it and I'm too tired to go search for it.
If you're serious about typing in Russian, you don't type the control-meta-alt-whacky sequences.
You spend $15 and buy a plastic keyboard overlay, one of those little flexible jobs with the alternate characters printed on them. Change your keymapping -- they make keymap files to match the popular overlay's plastic sheets, I'm told -- and you're done.
("Most" stars...?!)This quote from the article:
I'm glad I'm not the only one mystified by our planet's weather. (Like, how come it only rains on the days I don't bring an umbrella?)
The article is really cool, though, especially on the techniques they used as a starting point.
Large chunks of the WWII-era plotline in Cryptonomicon are pinned on precisely this problem (how to make best use of the broken Enigma ciphers without letting Germany know that Enigma has been broken).
Anybody who thinks this is a simple, clear issue should pull his head out of his ass and go read that book. (The book is good regardless, but also goes to show that the problems of the intelligence community haven't changed much.)
...but I honestly don't know whether it's supposed to, or whether it just happens to do so.
Absolutely. Anybody who uses a single compiler on an important project (at least during the development stage) is just begging for problems later on down the road.
Well, yeah, but it only works when you tell the compiler and linker what you're doing. The '#pragma telepathy' extension still hasn't been checked in to the main GCC source tree. :-)
Under Solaris, I do similar things with the uber-kickass watchmalloc library.
ODR is One Definition Rule. It's the clause of the ISO C++ Standard (that's where you'd go to look for it) that says that an entity used in a program must be defined exactly once.
Some of the KDE libs apparently were trying to define things more than once, and have the linker merge them. Which falls outside the realm of C++, and is actually done for some behind-the-scenes things, but not normally, and not by default.
Anyhow, there was a long thread on the gcc list, where the remaining multiple inheritence issues were dealt with, and the ODR problems explained to the good KDE folks. So all should be well there.
Slow startup times remain; that's a different problem.
Yes, GCC 3.1 compiles KDE 3.0 just fine, according to initial prerelease reports. However...
"C++" as you call it, was doing pretty well. Most of the problem was that the KDE library folks expected to be able to break the ODR and have GNU ld magically fix it for them. (Even open source projects have to follow the rules of the programming language in use, sorry...)
No wonder the roundup showed crappy results. They used GCC 2.95.2, which is three years old and uses a library that's even older.
GCC 3.x uses a rewritten library. I suspect their "library conformance" ratings would be quite different if they'd tested a compiler that's actually supported.
Absolutely. In professional technical circles, Linux's procfs has a well-earned and well-deserved reputation as a random dumping ground for anything which strikes the LKML folks as k3w1. There's a very clearly-written article on the subject buried somewhere in Usenet; I thought I'd saved a copy but cannot find it at the moment.
Okay, I will. How about, "That's pretty accurate, and most anyone who uses both Linux and Solaris on a daily basis will agree."
Possibly not the cynical comment you were looking for :-) but the design and stability of Linux has a long way to go to catch up with Solaris 8. As far as cool'n'nifty user features go, I can just compile the occasional GNU utilities on my Solaris box.
Actually, you could just rename the account. The "home directory" still points to the same directory paths, but those are stored in the registry and can be tweaked if you really feel the need.
They won't need to train anything. Just have some other bees, or wasps, or large birds, or my neighbor's dog, or anything else that naturally chases and [tries to] eat bees.
EE is like AoE with all the good add-ons included, and all the bad parts removed.
And since the 3.1 release is now nearly a month behind, due to no fault of Mitchell's, I'm not surprised that he's busy.
Fire up yer browser, point it at the local AnswerBook2 server (or http://docs.sun.com/), and find the System Administrator Collection. Flip down to "SunSHIELD Basic Security Monitor Guide." Read about how to enable auditing.
Then tell it to record full paths, flip the switch, and watch your hard drives fill up in seconds due to the massive amount of auditing information being logged.
Yes, and yes. :-) Depending on where you work, and for which agency and directorate, you may only need a background check, not a formal clearance. But a good starting assumption would be that you'd need a Secret clearance, which isn't too difficult to get as long as you're not an active terrorist.
Wow. Just down in the road in Dayton, OH, those of us on the air force base can't find enough qualified IT people. Have you considered working in civil service for a while? The pay's pretty good at the IT level.
Limericks are not my choice of verse.
Rhyming three lines is horrid, the worst!
Rhyming two lines is fine,
I do that all the time,
But making the third line rhyme is completely out of the question.