Because the publisher wants you to wait until midnight instead of 11:00PM to buy their book, it's some sort of orwellian intellectual property digital rights holocaust?!
Well, you can do your part to fight the power!
Buy the book at midnight in your time zone, then drive to the next time zone and sell it at 11PM! Screw DRM! Anarchy!!11!
"Hey buddy, I have one and you can buy it before anyone else for only $150"
Thats what they're trying to prevent. Gouging. This is perfectly acceptable.
It's perfectly acceptable, but can anyone explain why?
In your scenario, the guy who has the book: has he bought it or stolen it? If he bought it for the cover price, then the publisher has made the money they expected for that copy of the book. How does this hurt them?
On the other hand, if it was stolen, well, the guy's a thief, not just a scalper. How does the artificial release date help prevent theft by taking?
I've always wondered why scalping concert tickets is illegal (in some places). I've never heard of book scalpers... and in fact, book-scalping seems like a direct consequence of the publisher setting an arbitrary release date. If the bookstores were able to sell the books as soon as they got them, the scalper's buyer would be able to buy directly from the bookstore (yeah, assuming they don't sell all their copies before the would-be buyer even finds out they have it).
Publishers and concert promoters are against scalping... but I don't see why: it doesn't hurt them. Don't tell me it's because they want to protect the consumer: maybe book publishing isn't so bad, but music promoters are some of the sleaziest people in the world (at least the few that I've met: I'm sure there are counterexamples out there).
Programming can never be a fine art because a program is nothing but a specification of functional properties. Programming can be a highly developed craft, but it cannot be art.
What else but art can you call a one-person project, designing and writing a game for an "obsolete" and very limited (128 bytes of RAM!) system like the 2600?
(I just know someone's going to reply to this and say "masochism".... don't knock it until you've tried it)
Most of the commercial 2600 games were done this way too: one programmer/designer did the whole thing, from concept to finished code. I'd consider
David Crane an artist, to name one example. I have no idea whether he considered himself one or not back then (or now, for that matter), though.
A fine art is something that has no practical application whatsoever, and solely exists for aesthetic reasons. Like a painting, photograph, etc.
Video games generally have no practical application whatsoever (well, to make money, but paintings and photographs can do that, too). I'd say the homebrew 2600 scene is closer to "pure" art because nobody's expecting to make money doing it: it's done for its own sake, like art (so I hear
from a painter I know. I may not know much about art, but I know what I like!)
> If I'm trying to fix a mess of code and the comment says
>// We're fucked, this shouldn't happen
> My first impression is the coder was an idiot...
> If the comment over that same code says
>// Bad news. The lock was set, but somehow we're in the think-it's-unlocked section
> My first impression will be much more favorable.
But what if the comment says
We're fucked. The lock was set, but somehow we're in the think-it's-unlocked section
There are some of us who just use profanity as punctuation... though not, I confess, at work:)
> For the beginning standard source format would already help a lot, ie. one with computer readable metainformation on how to build, not just human readable INSTALL files.
Well, there's GNU autoconf (./configure && make && make install), but not everything uses it, and not every autoconf-using package uses the same options..
And you just *can't* force all developers to use the same build system. Some of us like autoconf (some hate it), some like a plain old Makefile, some like multiple Makefiles, some people (odd as it may seem) even like xmkmf and IMakefiles. This is a matter of personal preference, particularly for those of us writing free software because we enjoy it (in a corporate environment, if you're the boss, you can enforce such standards, of course).
Also, there can be build problems that couldn't possibly be foreseen: I developed my program on (say) Linux with glibc 2.3.3 and gcc 3.3.2. You try to compile it on MacOS 10.3 with gcc 3.4.0. It turns out that the semantics of some function call I used are slightly different on MacOS's glibc, or maybe they require a different header file to be #include'd, or maybe I used a C construct that's no longer legal in the new version of gcc (granted, I make a serious effort not to do this, but nobody's perfect).
How the heck am I supposed to know my program won't work on MacOS if I can't afford (or don't want) a nice Mac to test it on?
...And don't try to advocate giving up C and C++ in favor of (Java|Python|Perl|Ruby|whatever). Not everything can be written in a scripting (or VM-based) language, and not everyone knows or wants to learn a new language every couple of years. Not to mention, it's perfectly possible to write unportable code in any of the above languages. Even people who prefer such higher-level languages don't agree on which one is best.
> I wouldn't call it 'good technical reasons', most of it is simply historic and lack of standardization.
Any time anyone tries to propose a "one size fits all" solution, I just have to shake my head. Not everyone agrees on what's the best way to do
something. Not everybody *should*, otherwise no progress is made.
If you want a UNIX-like OS that has a formal set of standards and does a good job adhering to them, you might look outside the Linux world. MacOS X and Solaris are both pretty good in the "it just works" department, if that's your goal. The Linux community, for good or ill, has gotten as fragmented as the original UNIX community back in the 80s (before my time, but I read a lot).
Sorry, that turned out to be more of a rant than I intended. Please don't take it personally (I don't even know you).
> No, I don't want a.deb from you. I want a autopackage or a lsb-rpm or something else that will work on any distro.
You aren't likely to get such a thing unless you want all the binaries to be statically linked. *Shrug*, maybe that's exactly what you want, but there are good reasons for using dynamically linked libraries.
Even then, do you want your auto-super-RPM package format to include binaries for all architectures Linux has ever been ported to? Lots of people run Linux on powerPC (both 32- and 64-bit), or native AMD64, or ARM, or even Sparc (32- and 64-). How are we supposed to have the time/energy/desire to build binaries for all these arches, much less hardware to test them on?
Even if there were such a thing as an uber-package that would Just Work on all Linux distros (ignoring the x86 vs. powerPC vs. ARM, etc. issue), I as a developer wouldn't be releasing them. Why? Because I wouldn't be targetting Linux only: I'd release platform-independent source code which would compile on (at a bare minimum) Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, MacOS X, Solaris, Win32 (if possible and applicable), and hopefully BeOS. My earlier statement about not having the time/interest to support all the Linux distros applies even more so when multiplied by all the
variants & versions of all these OSes, and again by all the achitectures they run on.
What I'm talking about wouldn't apply to people working on commercial or otherwise binary-only software, of course. But you hardly ever see a closed-source package that works on multiple platforms anyway (e.g. Nero, DvdShrink, WinRAR are for Windows only, and damn near all binary-only Linux software is for x86 only).
I realize this is a much bigger can of worms than you wanted to open, but it's a partial answer to your implied question of "Why can't there just be One True Package Format that I can install and have it Just Work?"
Believe me, I'd love to have the same thing, but there are good technical reasons why it can't be as simple as we'd like.
Actually there are social/political reasons, too: since Linux isn't a single OS controlled by a single vendor, we'd have to make every Linux distributor agree on How Things Should Be Done. That's pretty unlikely, don't you think?
> Software packaging should be done by those that provide the software in the first place
Eh? Suppose I write software that runs on Linux, but I don't run Debian. Do you really want to install a.deb package made by me? I haven't got the time nor (frankly) the desire to package up my software for every distribution under the sun, and even if I wanted to, it would be more than a full-time job to learn the nuances of every distribution... and if I'm a software developer, I'd rather spend my time developing software than packaging it.
That's why there are package maintainers. Now it's possible for a package maintainer to do a good job, or a bad job... or to be too cautious, and cause long release cycles.
>While installing these drivers isn't anything more time-consuming than running a shell script, it has to be done for both SMP and the ordinary version of the kernel
Why? You only need the SMP kernel if you've actually got multiple CPUs... and if you do, you only need the non-SMP kernel for emergencies (such as upgrading the SMP kernel to a buggy/flaky version). This is rare enough that you don't really need the non-SMP kernel at all. Keep in mind, the SMP kernel will happily run on a single-processor system, so you don't even need a non-SMP kernel if you remove one of your CPUs...
>requiring in each case/etc/inittab to be edited, the system rebooted in command line mode only, the script run,/etc/inittab to be unedited, and the system rebooted.
Eh? You can do this without rebooting. Assuming runlevel 3 is console and 5 is X11, you fire up xterm or your favorite replacement, then run
init 3
to get to console mode without X running. After you upgrade your X driver(s), you run
init 5
to get your GUI back. No need to edit/etc/inittab, no need to reboot. Not all distros will use 3 and 5 (I think Debian uses 2 and 3?), so you might need to read/etc/inittab to find out.
(Sorry about replying to such an old post; I left this browser window open the whole time I was on vacation. Hope this saves you some time in the future).
>You may have had a bad experience with a vertically aligned keyboard, but this statement is pretty ridiculous...
Well, OK, maybe `unnatural' isn't the correct word. Likely it's no more unnatural than typing on any other keyboard.
Probably a better word is `totally different from what I've been doing the past 25+ years'. That's not necessarily a bad thing... but I'm used to being fast and accurate. Any change in keyboard engonomics (layout, force required to press key, etc) causes me to make lots of mistakes and irritates me in the extreme, so I'm not likely to switch unless I develop nasty wrist/hand problems...
Looking at the page you linked to, I can see your keyboard is a lot nicer than the old PET grid keyboard. Of course, the PET was made ~30 years ago, no surprises there.
People really buy USB volume knobs for $45? Er,
don't their speakers already come with a volume knob?
Most decent 5.1 speakers even come with a separate
"wired remote" volume control, so you don't have to reach for an actual speaker (which might be under the table or hung on the wall)
Also, any OS made in the last 6-7 years should have an easy way to change the volume with the mouse (little speaker in the system tray on windows, equivalent applet for whatever WM or desktop environment you're running on *NIX: are these really so hard to use?)
Re:Victum of Marketing
on
Blank Keyboard
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> when is someone gonna make a keyboard thats more grid-like so wasd lines up
I've typed on a few keyboards like that: the original Commodore PET had the whole keyboard as a grid, and there was a "gamers' keyboard" at the local Micro Center that had just the left half laid out as a grid.
In both cases, the grid-layout keyboards are almost impossible for humans to type on, particularly humans who already know how to type. Even if you've never typed before, I suspect you'd end up cursing at the grid layout. It looks like it would require pretty unnatural finger motions to use.
Actually, the gamers' keyboard looks like it'd be wonderful for gaming (what it was designed for), you'd just need a second keyboard for everything else (not a problem with USB, if you have the desk space for them both).
> other such advances like putting the numpad and home/end, etc keys in the middle so the typing is kind of ergonomical but doesn't have the numpad jetting off waaaayyy over to the right?!?!
Agree 100% about the numpad. In fact my favorite keyboard ever is the IBM Model M Spacesaver, which doesn't have the num pad at all. I really don't miss it (I don't use it on any keyboard at all), but I've seen some serious rapid data entry by people who do use it... The best of both worlds would be to have all keyboards come in two varieties (with or without numpad), or maybe for all keyboards to have removable numpads.
But then I think the best of all possible worlds would be a world where every desk has an IBM Model M on it, so what do I know?
Your idea of moving the home/end/etc. keys to the middle is the best thing I've seen in this thread. They could be grouped together in a row between the existing F-keys and numbers/punctuation, so you could reach them with just a little extra finger stretch instead of having to move your whole hand several inches to the right.
What is it with people wanting their prompts (or les output!) colorized, anyways...?
I ssh into 10 or 12 different machines every day. I find it really useful to use a different set of colors for the prompt on each one. Even though the hostname is in the prompt, color recognition happens at a lower level of the brain than reading (or something like that: I'm no expert on brains).
I don't know about color output from less, but I'm completely addicted to color syntax highlighting in vim. The only thing wrong with the default colors is the unreadable dark blue they chose for comments. I change it to bright cyan, since comments are supposed to be readable and obviously different from code.
I have begun to keep a plaintext file on my desktop computer with all my passwords in it and when they expire. My corporate IT guidelines are too secure for me, a legit user. So, I'll have to compromise security in order to comply with guidelines.
Why couldn't you encrypt that plaintext file with GPG? That would give you one single password to remember, but keep most of the convenience of having a password list. If there's only one password you have to remember, you can make it a complex passphrase.
Of course, it doesn't stop shoulder-surfers... you could always mount a rear-view mirror on your monitor:)
I think that Futurama is a hell of a lot funnier if you are a geek than not.
You have to be an old geek to get some of the jokes, like the time Bender shines the X-ray flashlight as his head and you can see a giant chip in his brain labelled `6502'. That cracked me up.. but would be about meaningless to anyone under 25 (or maybe 30, these days).
I cracked up when I saw "Bender's Computerized Dating Service: Discrete and Discreet"
Personally I would expect Mozilla to NOT USE THE SOUNDCARD FOR DISPLAYING WEB PAGES.
Agree, 100%.
And OSS is not the same as the Solaris sound...OSS was the light edition of a commercial sound offering for Linux
Right you are. That same commercial sound package was available for Solaris at one point though, which is what I was thinking of when I mis-remembered that. I have no idea if anyone ever actually bought & used the Solaris version though.
As of Linux-2.6 OSS is deprecated
But the OSS emulation layer for ALSA isn't, and it works pretty well, too.
Also, application vendors like mozilla (oss locking while alsa exists???)...
Well, Mozilla is meant to be a cross-platform application. Which would you expect it to use:
OSS, the Open Sound System, which is a cross-platform API for making sound on UNIX-like systems?
ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, which only exists on Linux?
Using OSS, the Mozilla devs can use the same code to make sound on Linux, Solaris, and the BSD's, at minimum.
...not that I really understand why a browser needs to make sound (surely that's a plug-in's job?), but that's not really relevant.
The fact that KDE still doesn't see cups as the prevalent and *best* printing platform confirms this.
Best printing platform for a desktop system, perhaps. I find its web UI annoying in the extreme when I have to use it on a server: I either have to use lynx (or links), or else have cups listen on 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1 so I can use a graphical browser (yes, I can and do use iptables rules and such to limit access; yes, I know how to use lynx, and it works well enough to get the job done). It'd be nice if cups has a well-enough documented config file syntax that I could just admin it with vi, or perhaps some commands that can be run from a shell (perhaps from cron, even) that can reconfigure, restart, get status, etc.
Also, since `upgrading' to cups, our print server seems to just stop working about once a week, for no discernible reason. I can fix it from the cups web UI by clicking `Start this Printer' or whatever it says... but with LPRNG and even good old Berkeley LPD I never had this problem.
(So why did I switch to cups? My preferred Linux distribution switched to cups, and I have literally no time to spend on admin tasks any more, so I use what I have. All you sysadmins out there: Never let your boss make you into a `developer with sysadmin responsibilities'. You'll end up a full-time dev, with no time to do admin work... but the boss will assume you're getting the job done, because things don't immediately catch fire and burn. He won't hire anyone to do your sysadm work for you, but he'll yell at you if bad things happen due to lack of maintenance... Sorry, I just had to get that out.)
Another answer to the parent would be that not everyone agrees on what's the best printing platform. Some people do form their own opinions, and sometimes those opinions don't conform to what other people push as `the best solution'. If you didn't already know this, you wouldn't be using Linux in the first place. Nothing stops you from using Windows, if you want a solution handed to you from on high. Lots of people do this, and lots of them even get useful work out of their machines. The whole point of Linux (for me anyway; it may be different for you) is freedom of choice.
Sadly, the whole point of my job has moved from being able to make the best choices for the company (as sysadm), to being told by marketing that I need to work 7 day weeks because they already sold a product that was still in the planning phase, and it must ship by their arbitrarily-chosen `target' date.
I shall quit bitching about work now... None of what I'm complaining about is new. None of it's even new to me.
Clearly something must have happened to wipe them out before they even became timelords.
In that case, how could the tree lady's PDA know what race he was, and why would she know anything about the time war and what happened to the Time Lords?
(Did anybody else find it appropriate that the tree peoples' tech spoke to them in bird-language? I thought it was a nice touch...)
I do wonder, tho, how come the Doc was able to live to 900 years in his first incarnation?
I have a theory about that...
Any Time Lord can live hundreds of years in the same body, provided they don't get seriously injured. They age at maybe 1/10 the rate of humans... so after 700-800 years, they start to look and feel old. The first Doctor (Hartnell) acted like a crusty old man... We don't know how old the Doc was when he `borrowed' the TARDIS, but he was old enough for Susan to think of him as her grandfather (or maybe he really was. I never thought so). Probably he led a very sheltered life on Gallifrey until he was 700 or so.
My theory is that the Doctor was afraid to regenerate. Maybe it's a common thing among `young' Time Lords: regeneration is a bit like death. After you regenerate, you're not the same `you' as you were before. There's continuity of memory, and the core personality survives, but drastically altered. The first Doctor put off regeneration until he `died' of natural causes (old age plus maybe a heart attack or a stroke brought on by the combination of fighting off the Cyberman plus exposure to arctic conditions?), at which point it kicked in as an involuntary survival mechanism.
Of course, the exception that proves the rule would be The Master: he's the same in all his incarnations (except the TV movie, where he acts like a cheap street hood... but he was using the brain and body of a human...)
Can you tell I've put way too much thought into this?
I just don't understand how open source drivers for my nVidia graphics card would help me.
Some of us can't use the closed-source drivers because we're not on the x86 architecture. The only NVidia card I own is the one that came with my dual G5 powermac. It works beautifully in MacOSX, of course, but I'm running a homebrewed ppc64 Linux. No 3D for me... probably never will be (*). If NVidia would release the specs to the card (note: just the specifications, not any code), there would have been a nice open source driver for the card long ago, and I'd just compile it and go... Your closed, binary-only drivers are fine, provided you're using the architecture they were compiled for, but understand that not everybody is.
There is an open source driver that partly supports the 3D (the nv driver that comes with XFree/X.org), but its performance is rotten compared to what the card is capable of. If the specs were available, the people who wrote this driver would have been able to make it good. As it stands, they did the best they could do by reverse-engineering.
(*) Though I'm not really complaining: I bought the mac because I wanted a fast 64-bit dual-CPU workstation that was designed to run UNIX. I think of it as a modern descendant of my old Sparcstation boxes... and I'm having lots of fun porting my favorite Linux distributon to it (still in progress). Still, it might be nice to play Quakeforge on it once in a while.
> Actually, how many sci-fi series haven't ended up being cancelled?
As opposed to all the tv shows that were never cancelled?
I can think of one: Doctor Who. It was `on hiatus' for ~15 years, but the BBC never announced that it was permanently cancelled (and the new series seems OK based on the one ep. I've seen...)
The BBC doesn't quite follow the rules of commercial TV as found in the US, though. They're partly state-supported (I'm sure someone from the UK will clarify that, I don't really know the details), so Dr. Who isn't really a counterexample to your point.
Apparently, Boxleitner was more of a "name" than O'Hare
Ah, come on, you'd seen him before at least once. Boxleitner was Tron!
B5 is something I passed by when I randomly saw an episode on network TV. I thought it was a cheap knock-off of Star Trek. Someone convinced me to start watching at the beginning and I got hooked. It's got its flaws (and you do a good job of pointing them out), but it really is like watching an 80-hour-long movie, and at no point does it really `jump the shark'... though season 5 did feel kind of redundant.
(And yes, I'm the kind of person who loves the idea of an 80-hour-long movie... though I can't bring myself to watch the uber-hyper-extended editions of LOTR).
I got nothing at all from firefly. I just cant accept teh use of slugthrowers on a spacecraft.
If that's your major reason for not being able to suspend disbelief, I recommend you watch it again and try harder this time.
Lasers and other futuristic weapons exist in Firefly (there's even an episode about a plan to steal the first prototype laser gun from an antiques collector), but they're expensive to buy and maintain, particularly out in the fringes of colonized space where the crew of Serenity spend most of their time.
Of course, you might have other reasons for not liking the show (it's not perfect, nothing is), but you might want to give it another chance anyway...
To stay partially on topic: Enterprise finally got watchable in season 4, true, but nobody can say it never got its chance. They made 3 seasons of (mostly) boring Berman-style pointless fluff, when they could have been making a good Trek prequel instead. I sat through most of the first 3 seasons due to having a roommate who loves anything branded Trek, and I tried to enjoy them... but they just weren't good science fiction, nor were they good space opera, nor even good fluff. About the nicest thing I can say about Enterprise seasons 1-3 is that they're better than Voyager... but so was `Leonard part VI'
Ugh. I usually hate people who rant about TV shows, pardon me for my diatribe.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you can do your part to fight the power!
Buy the book at midnight in your time zone, then drive to the next time zone and sell it at 11PM! Screw DRM! Anarchy!!11!
What..?
This isn't a digital book?
No DRM involved?
Oh... well, never mind then.
It's perfectly acceptable, but can anyone explain why?
In your scenario, the guy who has the book: has he bought it or stolen it? If he bought it for the cover price, then the publisher has made the money they expected for that copy of the book. How does this hurt them?
On the other hand, if it was stolen, well, the guy's a thief, not just a scalper. How does the artificial release date help prevent theft by taking?
I've always wondered why scalping concert tickets is illegal (in some places). I've never heard of book scalpers... and in fact, book-scalping seems like a direct consequence of the publisher setting an arbitrary release date. If the bookstores were able to sell the books as soon as they got them, the scalper's buyer would be able to buy directly from the bookstore (yeah, assuming they don't sell all their copies before the would-be buyer even finds out they have it).
Publishers and concert promoters are against scalping... but I don't see why: it doesn't hurt them. Don't tell me it's because they want to protect the consumer: maybe book publishing isn't so bad, but music promoters are some of the sleaziest people in the world (at least the few that I've met: I'm sure there are counterexamples out there).
What about what these guys are doing?
What else but art can you call a one-person project, designing and writing a game for an "obsolete" and very limited (128 bytes of RAM!) system like the 2600?
(I just know someone's going to reply to this and say "masochism".... don't knock it until you've tried it)
Most of the commercial 2600 games were done this way too: one programmer/designer did the whole thing, from concept to finished code. I'd consider David Crane an artist, to name one example. I have no idea whether he considered himself one or not back then (or now, for that matter), though.
A fine art is something that has no practical application whatsoever, and solely exists for aesthetic reasons. Like a painting, photograph, etc.
Video games generally have no practical application whatsoever (well, to make money, but paintings and photographs can do that, too). I'd say the homebrew 2600 scene is closer to "pure" art because nobody's expecting to make money doing it: it's done for its own sake, like art (so I hear from a painter I know. I may not know much about art, but I know what I like!)
>
> My first impression is the coder was an idiot...
> If the comment over that same code says // Bad news. The lock was set, but somehow we're in the think-it's-unlocked section
>
> My first impression will be much more favorable.
But what if the comment says
There are some of us who just use profanity as punctuation... though not, I confess, at work
Well, there's GNU autoconf (./configure && make && make install), but not everything uses it, and not every autoconf-using package uses the same options..
And you just *can't* force all developers to use the same build system. Some of us like autoconf (some hate it), some like a plain old Makefile, some like multiple Makefiles, some people (odd as it may seem) even like xmkmf and IMakefiles. This is a matter of personal preference, particularly for those of us writing free software because we enjoy it (in a corporate environment, if you're the boss, you can enforce such standards, of course).
Also, there can be build problems that couldn't possibly be foreseen: I developed my program on (say) Linux with glibc 2.3.3 and gcc 3.3.2. You try to compile it on MacOS 10.3 with gcc 3.4.0. It turns out that the semantics of some function call I used are slightly different on MacOS's glibc, or maybe they require a different header file to be #include'd, or maybe I used a C construct that's no longer legal in the new version of gcc (granted, I make a serious effort not to do this, but nobody's perfect).
How the heck am I supposed to know my program won't work on MacOS if I can't afford (or don't want) a nice Mac to test it on?
> I wouldn't call it 'good technical reasons', most of it is simply historic and lack of standardization.
Any time anyone tries to propose a "one size fits all" solution, I just have to shake my head. Not everyone agrees on what's the best way to do something. Not everybody *should*, otherwise no progress is made.
If you want a UNIX-like OS that has a formal set of standards and does a good job adhering to them, you might look outside the Linux world. MacOS X and Solaris are both pretty good in the "it just works" department, if that's your goal. The Linux community, for good or ill, has gotten as fragmented as the original UNIX community back in the 80s (before my time, but I read a lot).
Sorry, that turned out to be more of a rant than I intended. Please don't take it personally (I don't even know you).
You aren't likely to get such a thing unless you want all the binaries to be statically linked. *Shrug*, maybe that's exactly what you want, but there are good reasons for using dynamically linked libraries.
Even then, do you want your auto-super-RPM package format to include binaries for all architectures Linux has ever been ported to? Lots of people run Linux on powerPC (both 32- and 64-bit), or native AMD64, or ARM, or even Sparc (32- and 64-). How are we supposed to have the time/energy/desire to build binaries for all these arches, much less hardware to test them on?
Even if there were such a thing as an uber-package that would Just Work on all Linux distros (ignoring the x86 vs. powerPC vs. ARM, etc. issue), I as a developer wouldn't be releasing them. Why? Because I wouldn't be targetting Linux only: I'd release platform-independent source code which would compile on (at a bare minimum) Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, MacOS X, Solaris, Win32 (if possible and applicable), and hopefully BeOS. My earlier statement about not having the time/interest to support all the Linux distros applies even more so when multiplied by all the variants & versions of all these OSes, and again by all the achitectures they run on.
What I'm talking about wouldn't apply to people working on commercial or otherwise binary-only software, of course. But you hardly ever see a closed-source package that works on multiple platforms anyway (e.g. Nero, DvdShrink, WinRAR are for Windows only, and damn near all binary-only Linux software is for x86 only).
I realize this is a much bigger can of worms than you wanted to open, but it's a partial answer to your implied question of "Why can't there just be One True Package Format that I can install and have it Just Work?"
Believe me, I'd love to have the same thing, but there are good technical reasons why it can't be as simple as we'd like.
Actually there are social/political reasons, too: since Linux isn't a single OS controlled by a single vendor, we'd have to make every Linux distributor agree on How Things Should Be Done. That's pretty unlikely, don't you think?
Eh? Suppose I write software that runs on Linux, but I don't run Debian. Do you really want to install a .deb package made by me? I haven't got the time nor (frankly) the desire to package up my software for every distribution under the sun, and even if I wanted to, it would be more than a full-time job to learn the nuances of every distribution... and if I'm a software developer, I'd rather spend my time developing software than packaging it.
That's why there are package maintainers. Now it's possible for a package maintainer to do a good job, or a bad job... or to be too cautious, and cause long release cycles.
Why? You only need the SMP kernel if you've actually got multiple CPUs... and if you do, you only need the non-SMP kernel for emergencies (such as upgrading the SMP kernel to a buggy/flaky version). This is rare enough that you don't really need the non-SMP kernel at all. Keep in mind, the SMP kernel will happily run on a single-processor system, so you don't even need a non-SMP kernel if you remove one of your CPUs...
>requiring in each case /etc/inittab to be edited, the system rebooted in command line mode only, the script run, /etc/inittab to be unedited, and the system rebooted.
Eh? You can do this without rebooting. Assuming runlevel 3 is console and 5 is X11, you fire up xterm or your favorite replacement, then run
to get to console mode without X running. After you upgrade your X driver(s), you run to get your GUI back. No need to edit(Sorry about replying to such an old post; I left this browser window open the whole time I was on vacation. Hope this saves you some time in the future).
Well, OK, maybe `unnatural' isn't the correct word. Likely it's no more unnatural than typing on any other keyboard.
Probably a better word is `totally different from what I've been doing the past 25+ years'. That's not necessarily a bad thing... but I'm used to being fast and accurate. Any change in keyboard engonomics (layout, force required to press key, etc) causes me to make lots of mistakes and irritates me in the extreme, so I'm not likely to switch unless I develop nasty wrist/hand problems...
Looking at the page you linked to, I can see your keyboard is a lot nicer than the old PET grid keyboard. Of course, the PET was made ~30 years ago, no surprises there.
I switched to lefty mousing partly for that reason a few years ago. Of course, the other reason for switching is that I actually am left-handed :)
>Righties could use a Model M with the numpad/inverted T moved the left side of the keyboard.
That would definitely be better than right-handed mousers having to move their hand 6 or more inches to use the mouse.
Of course, the vast majority of end-users (at least the ones I deal with) doesn't seem to know about touch-typing or home-row keys anyway.
Most decent 5.1 speakers even come with a separate "wired remote" volume control, so you don't have to reach for an actual speaker (which might be under the table or hung on the wall)
Also, any OS made in the last 6-7 years should have an easy way to change the volume with the mouse (little speaker in the system tray on windows, equivalent applet for whatever WM or desktop environment you're running on *NIX: are these really so hard to use?)
I've typed on a few keyboards like that: the original Commodore PET had the whole keyboard as a grid, and there was a "gamers' keyboard" at the local Micro Center that had just the left half laid out as a grid.
In both cases, the grid-layout keyboards are almost impossible for humans to type on, particularly humans who already know how to type. Even if you've never typed before, I suspect you'd end up cursing at the grid layout. It looks like it would require pretty unnatural finger motions to use.
Actually, the gamers' keyboard looks like it'd be wonderful for gaming (what it was designed for), you'd just need a second keyboard for everything else (not a problem with USB, if you have the desk space for them both).
> other such advances like putting the numpad and home/end, etc keys in the middle so the typing is kind of ergonomical but doesn't have the numpad jetting off waaaayyy over to the right?!?!
Agree 100% about the numpad. In fact my favorite keyboard ever is the IBM Model M Spacesaver, which doesn't have the num pad at all. I really don't miss it (I don't use it on any keyboard at all), but I've seen some serious rapid data entry by people who do use it... The best of both worlds would be to have all keyboards come in two varieties (with or without numpad), or maybe for all keyboards to have removable numpads.
But then I think the best of all possible worlds would be a world where every desk has an IBM Model M on it, so what do I know?
Your idea of moving the home/end/etc. keys to the middle is the best thing I've seen in this thread. They could be grouped together in a row between the existing F-keys and numbers/punctuation, so you could reach them with just a little extra finger stretch instead of having to move your whole hand several inches to the right.
I ssh into 10 or 12 different machines every day. I find it really useful to use a different set of colors for the prompt on each one. Even though the hostname is in the prompt, color recognition happens at a lower level of the brain than reading (or something like that: I'm no expert on brains).
I don't know about color output from less, but I'm completely addicted to color syntax highlighting in vim. The only thing wrong with the default colors is the unreadable dark blue they chose for comments. I change it to bright cyan, since comments are supposed to be readable and obviously different from code.
Why couldn't you encrypt that plaintext file with GPG? That would give you one single password to remember, but keep most of the convenience of having a password list. If there's only one password you have to remember, you can make it a complex passphrase.
Of course, it doesn't stop shoulder-surfers... you could always mount a rear-view mirror on your monitor :)
I'm convinced!
That's the best Firefly conspiracy theory I've ever heard.. had I mod points, you'd get +1 Insightful.
You have to be an old geek to get some of the jokes, like the time Bender shines the X-ray flashlight as his head and you can see a giant chip in his brain labelled `6502'. That cracked me up.. but would be about meaningless to anyone under 25 (or maybe 30, these days).
I cracked up when I saw "Bender's Computerized Dating Service: Discrete and Discreet"
You weren't the only one.
Whoever says Futurama isn't geek humor isn't paying attention...
I also like the Star Trek parodies:
"Is there anything to eat on this planet?"
"Well, it's a class M planet, so it should at least have Roddenberrys."
Even if you hate Star Trek, you gotta admit it makes great parody material.
Agree, 100%.
And OSS is not the same as the Solaris sound...OSS was the light edition of a commercial sound offering for Linux
Right you are. That same commercial sound package was available for Solaris at one point though, which is what I was thinking of when I mis-remembered that. I have no idea if anyone ever actually bought & used the Solaris version though.
As of Linux-2.6 OSS is deprecated
But the OSS emulation layer for ALSA isn't, and it works pretty well, too.
Well, Mozilla is meant to be a cross-platform application. Which would you expect it to use:
OSS, the Open Sound System, which is a cross-platform API for making sound on UNIX-like systems?
ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, which only exists on Linux?
Using OSS, the Mozilla devs can use the same code to make sound on Linux, Solaris, and the BSD's, at minimum.
The fact that KDE still doesn't see cups as the prevalent and *best* printing platform confirms this.
Best printing platform for a desktop system, perhaps. I find its web UI annoying in the extreme when I have to use it on a server: I either have to use lynx (or links), or else have cups listen on 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1 so I can use a graphical browser (yes, I can and do use iptables rules and such to limit access; yes, I know how to use lynx, and it works well enough to get the job done). It'd be nice if cups has a well-enough documented config file syntax that I could just admin it with vi, or perhaps some commands that can be run from a shell (perhaps from cron, even) that can reconfigure, restart, get status, etc.
Also, since `upgrading' to cups, our print server seems to just stop working about once a week, for no discernible reason. I can fix it from the cups web UI by clicking `Start this Printer' or whatever it says... but with LPRNG and even good old Berkeley LPD I never had this problem.
(So why did I switch to cups? My preferred Linux distribution switched to cups, and I have literally no time to spend on admin tasks any more, so I use what I have. All you sysadmins out there: Never let your boss make you into a `developer with sysadmin responsibilities'. You'll end up a full-time dev, with no time to do admin work... but the boss will assume you're getting the job done, because things don't immediately catch fire and burn. He won't hire anyone to do your sysadm work for you, but he'll yell at you if bad things happen due to lack of maintenance... Sorry, I just had to get that out.)
Another answer to the parent would be that not everyone agrees on what's the best printing platform. Some people do form their own opinions, and sometimes those opinions don't conform to what other people push as `the best solution'. If you didn't already know this, you wouldn't be using Linux in the first place. Nothing stops you from using Windows, if you want a solution handed to you from on high. Lots of people do this, and lots of them even get useful work out of their machines. The whole point of Linux (for me anyway; it may be different for you) is freedom of choice.
Sadly, the whole point of my job has moved from being able to make the best choices for the company (as sysadm), to being told by marketing that I need to work 7 day weeks because they already sold a product that was still in the planning phase, and it must ship by their arbitrarily-chosen `target' date.
I shall quit bitching about work now... None of what I'm complaining about is new. None of it's even new to me.
Because he's Merlin?
(Just recently saw that episode, it's called Battlefield).
In that case, how could the tree lady's PDA know what race he was, and why would she know anything about the time war and what happened to the Time Lords?
(Did anybody else find it appropriate that the tree peoples' tech spoke to them in bird-language? I thought it was a nice touch...)
I have a theory about that...
Any Time Lord can live hundreds of years in the same body, provided they don't get seriously injured. They age at maybe 1/10 the rate of humans... so after 700-800 years, they start to look and feel old. The first Doctor (Hartnell) acted like a crusty old man... We don't know how old the Doc was when he `borrowed' the TARDIS, but he was old enough for Susan to think of him as her grandfather (or maybe he really was. I never thought so). Probably he led a very sheltered life on Gallifrey until he was 700 or so.
My theory is that the Doctor was afraid to regenerate. Maybe it's a common thing among `young' Time Lords: regeneration is a bit like death. After you regenerate, you're not the same `you' as you were before. There's continuity of memory, and the core personality survives, but drastically altered. The first Doctor put off regeneration until he `died' of natural causes (old age plus maybe a heart attack or a stroke brought on by the combination of fighting off the Cyberman plus exposure to arctic conditions?), at which point it kicked in as an involuntary survival mechanism.
Of course, the exception that proves the rule would be The Master: he's the same in all his incarnations (except the TV movie, where he acts like a cheap street hood... but he was using the brain and body of a human...)
Can you tell I've put way too much thought into this?
Some of us can't use the closed-source drivers because we're not on the x86 architecture. The only NVidia card I own is the one that came with my dual G5 powermac. It works beautifully in MacOSX, of course, but I'm running a homebrewed ppc64 Linux. No 3D for me... probably never will be (*). If NVidia would release the specs to the card (note: just the specifications, not any code), there would have been a nice open source driver for the card long ago, and I'd just compile it and go... Your closed, binary-only drivers are fine, provided you're using the architecture they were compiled for, but understand that not everybody is.
There is an open source driver that partly supports the 3D (the nv driver that comes with XFree/X.org), but its performance is rotten compared to what the card is capable of. If the specs were available, the people who wrote this driver would have been able to make it good. As it stands, they did the best they could do by reverse-engineering.
(*) Though I'm not really complaining: I bought the mac because I wanted a fast 64-bit dual-CPU workstation that was designed to run UNIX. I think of it as a modern descendant of my old Sparcstation boxes... and I'm having lots of fun porting my favorite Linux distributon to it (still in progress). Still, it might be nice to play Quakeforge on it once in a while.
As opposed to all the tv shows that were never cancelled?
I can think of one: Doctor Who. It was `on hiatus' for ~15 years, but the BBC never announced that it was permanently cancelled (and the new series seems OK based on the one ep. I've seen...)
The BBC doesn't quite follow the rules of commercial TV as found in the US, though. They're partly state-supported (I'm sure someone from the UK will clarify that, I don't really know the details), so Dr. Who isn't really a counterexample to your point.
Ah, come on, you'd seen him before at least once. Boxleitner was Tron!
B5 is something I passed by when I randomly saw an episode on network TV. I thought it was a cheap knock-off of Star Trek. Someone convinced me to start watching at the beginning and I got hooked. It's got its flaws (and you do a good job of pointing them out), but it really is like watching an 80-hour-long movie, and at no point does it really `jump the shark'... though season 5 did feel kind of redundant.
(And yes, I'm the kind of person who loves the idea of an 80-hour-long movie... though I can't bring myself to watch the uber-hyper-extended editions of LOTR).
If that's your major reason for not being able to suspend disbelief, I recommend you watch it again and try harder this time.
Lasers and other futuristic weapons exist in Firefly (there's even an episode about a plan to steal the first prototype laser gun from an antiques collector), but they're expensive to buy and maintain, particularly out in the fringes of colonized space where the crew of Serenity spend most of their time.
Of course, you might have other reasons for not liking the show (it's not perfect, nothing is), but you might want to give it another chance anyway...
To stay partially on topic: Enterprise finally got watchable in season 4, true, but nobody can say it never got its chance. They made 3 seasons of (mostly) boring Berman-style pointless fluff, when they could have been making a good Trek prequel instead. I sat through most of the first 3 seasons due to having a roommate who loves anything branded Trek, and I tried to enjoy them... but they just weren't good science fiction, nor were they good space opera, nor even good fluff. About the nicest thing I can say about Enterprise seasons 1-3 is that they're better than Voyager... but so was `Leonard part VI'
Ugh. I usually hate people who rant about TV shows, pardon me for my diatribe.